Storms
by Naja Melanoleuca
Summary: Is brutal honesty better than false hope? Foreman, Cameron, and Chase have to deal with an ethical question and whether optimism, pessimism, or realism offers the most solice at night.
1. Chapter 1

A/N Hello all and Happy New Year! I've done a story about Chase and House and Chase and Foreman, so I thought it would be fun to do one about Chase and Cameron. The differences in the way they approach things is so glaring it is sort of fun to work with. This section is just a start and the plot will get more developed in the next chapter. I just wanted to get this out while it was still New Years.

**Storms 1**

11:30 am December 31st

Chase collapsed flat on his back on his sofa, propping one foot up on the arm, a bottle of water balanced on his stomach. He had just finished a 20 k run and he was enjoying the feeling of not having ice cold air whipping past his face and freezing his lungs. His ears were almost ringing from the silence. He lied there for a while, just sipping water and listening to his fish tank bubble. He was hoping he could fall back asleep but no such luck, he was too hungry. Cass, his best mate, had called him at 8am from Sydney, piss drunk and smooching into the phone to try and mimic a New Year's kiss. They made it a tradition to call each other on New Years every year if they weren't together. They would have been this year if it weren't for stupid House.

He was glad to be back inside. There was a storm brewing outside and it was going to be ugly. The sky was a dark slate grey, already starting to loosen its moisture on the world in the form of heavy, wet snow and freezing rain. Chase was lucky that it had held off until his last kilo or so. When he had been a child, he had loved storms. He had grown up on the beach and would spend hours watching the savage raging of storms out at sea. The violence of them both frightened and intrigued him and their volume drowning out the sounds of his parents fighting. He would imagine what a true costal monsoon would be like, having not seen one until he was much older. Even as he grew into adulthood, his love of rain and thunder continued. When his mother had been dying, he had spent hours sitting on a park bench in the rain, letting the downpour soak him to the bone. He had abstractly hoped that the baptism by nature could wash away his sins or at least be used as penance. You could scream as loud as you wanted in the middle of a storm and no one would hear you.

He got up to make himself something to eat and seethed about House. He had asked months ago, in May in fact, if he could have at least five days off around New Years. He had worked Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas day with the promise that he could take a longer vacation and go home. Cass had wanted him to accompany her to some big name director's party. He was supposed to simper and smile, look cute and not be too intellectual, in short act like a retarded trophy husband and make sure she didn't make an ass out of herself. It was not necessarily his favourite thing to do but he really wanted to see his best mate and he really needed to go home for a while. He missed the sound of the ocean and smell of the sea. And he supposed he had to make a very unpleasant visit to pay his respects, January 1st was of course his father's birthday. But House had decided four days ago, that he was going to go with Wilson to Las Vegas for New Years, leaving Chase with only two days off, which was not nearly enough time to go home. He needed a minimum of five days since it took 30 hours just to get down there and over 24 to get back.

Chase opened his ice box and scanned the grim contents, half a loaf of bread, a bottle of vegemite, some suspicious looking Styrofoam containers, and half a chocolate cake given too him by one of the nurses in radiology (House and Wilson had eaten the other half before they left). He opted for canned soup and vegemite on toast instead, saving the cake for dinner. He returned to the sofa, flipping through the channels. He didn't usually use his table unless he had company. He happily settled on an X-Files marathon and enjoyed his meal. He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do with the rest of his day. Tomorrow, he would go to mass and light a candle for his father, since he couldn't go to his grave in person but today was up in the air. He had already gone for a long run, done his laundry, and cleaned his flat from top to bottom. The movies would be a zoo, plus he didn't like going by himself anyway. He thought about going to the shore so he could at least see and hear the ocean even if it wasn't the one he was used to but it would be nothing more than a nightmarish morass of drunks and revelers tonight and he wasn't in the mood. Everyone he knew was either out of town, busy, or at work. In a way this was almost as depressing as Christmas but at least then he had been at work. He guessed he should at least go to the market and get some food for the weekend.

He huddled on his sofa, watching Mulder beat up Krycek for his betrayal and he chuckled, "I know how you feel, brother. One mistake and no one ever lets you forget it." He lounged there until the end of the episode, drinking his tea, before deciding it was time to have a nice, long bath. Chase well realized that his pension for soaking in hot baths made him seem a little like a Nancy-boy but he didn't care. He loved the feel of the water moving across his skin and the warm of it. Chase was pretty laid back about discomfort. He could ignore a lot of little annoyances but the one thing that he couldn't ignore and that he really hated was the cold. New Jersey didn't have cold like the mountains. In Switzerland or Northern Italy it was cold but it was dry and you warmed up after being indoors for a few minutes. Here, the cold was damp and seemed to seep into your bones, making time drag from one dreary, grey day to the next. The threat of snow or sleet seemed to always hang in the air and it sapped the energy out of him. He had found that sitting in an extremely hot bath helped ward the chill away a little bit.

He stripped off his layers of clothes as he walked towards his downstairs washroom and took a quick shower to clean himself off. The bathtub was for soaking not cleaning. Just has he had gotten the water to the perfect temperature and picked out the perfect music to relax to, his pager started its shrill trilling. He ground his teeth in frustration. It was probably House calling from Las Vegas asking him to wire him money. He scrolled through the message, it was from Foreman. It read, "Come in IMEDIATELY. Multiple bus accident. Don't take interstate."

He turned the TV to a local station, just in time to see an overly stylized anchor read the new about a multiple vehicle accident involving several tour buses and a tractor-trailer carrying crude oil. The interstate was shut down and emergency vehicles were having a hard time getting to the wounded. He stood, dumb founded for a moment, before he shook himself into action. He pulled back his solar shades and could see a dark plume of smoke rising from the west at the same time he could see it on the television. He shivered at how bad it must be for him to see it from miles away. He quickly toweled himself off and got dressed in several layers of warm clothes. He would bike across the park rather than driving, it would be faster.

Before he knew it, he was throwing his things down in their conference room and heading down to the clinic on the second floor, assuming patients would be there. He was again shocked at the magnitude of the wreck. There were injured people everywhere, some sitting and standing because there weren't enough gurneys for them. It looked like a war zone. If this was what the placed looked like when the emergency vehicles were having a hard time reaching the wounded, he hated to see what it would be like if they had free access. He grabbed several gloves and looked around for where to go. Cuddy stood in the center of it all, barking orders, immaculately dressed. He also spotted Foreman in the corner, working on an injured man. He opted for Foreman rather than Cuddy.

"Foreman." He called by way of a greeting. "Is there any rhyme or reason or do we just choose someone and start working?"

"Chase, help me with this guy. We need an X-ray and MRI of his leg." Foreman told him. Chase stood still for a moment. The man in front of Foreman was clearly injured but his injuries were not life threatening. He looked around and noticed people who looked much worse. But before he could answer, he heard Cameron yell his name.

"Chase, I need you." He walked over to her. She stood beside a small toddler, who had clearly been crying. "Help me try and find his mother." Cameron asked him. He gave her just a ridiculous of a look as he had given Foreman. That was a job for a med student or a nurse. But again, before he could tell her that he thought he should actually treat a patient, Cuddy bellowed at him.

"Dr. Chase!" He was unable to stop his reflexive flinch at her harsh tone. "Get downstairs and start assessing people's conditions, only work on the critical ones. If they can be moved, move them up here. And don't work on anyone beyond critical." She told him with a pointed look. He understood her meaning all too clearly. 'Don't waste time on someone that can't be saved.' He nodded and headed towards the stairs and was stopped again by her. "And Dr. Chase, your priority is saving lives, then saving organs."

If he had thought that the second floor was bad, it was nothing compared to the actual ER on the first floor. The first thing he registered was the smell. It stank of blood, vomit, urine and feces. Then there was sound, people writhing and screaming in pain or despair. The lights were bright and glaring. This was not his ideal place to work, being so different from his beloved ICU, where thing were quiet and dim.

"Dr. Chase." Dr. Standish, the head of ICU and Anesthesia hailed him. "Good to have you here, son." Dr. Standish was a fifty something year old ex-army doctor with a strong Alabama accent, baldhead, and round belly. He liked things honest and by the book and was always there with a kind word or encouragement when someone needed it. He could not have been more different than House. "You take that bay over there." He pointed to curtained off area. "Get people stable then divide them up by injuries. If they are too far-gone, then consider if they can be a possible donor. If they can, do your best to keep them alive long enough to find the family, if not make them comfortable till the end." He put a large hand on Chase's shoulder. "If we all get through this, I'm buying the drinks."

"Ok." Chase answered and headed towards his bay. He took a deep breath, steeled his courage, and opened the curtain. The sight that met him almost made him close it again. There were 15 people lined up, three deep and five rows. They were all bleeding and with slow respirations. He looked over and noticed that Carol and April were his two nurses. He thanked God for that small favour and set to work.

He looked up at the clock and noted the time at 12:45, when he started working. He didn't notice the time again until Foreman came to get him at 5pm. He couldn't have told you how many patients he worked on or what their names were. He just remembered injuries and signing more death certificates than he wanted to. It really wasn't as bad as he thought it would be. After the first two people he sort of went into autopilot. He didn't have time to think or analyze, just act, which was good because if he were thinking, then he would start to panic because he couldn't save everyone.

This lack of thinking time was seriously starting to get on Foreman's nerves. He prided himself on his ability to figure out complex problems with little information. However, there was nothing to figure out with most of these patients. They were hurt and they needed help, no mystery, just the mechanics of medicine. He found it stressful and dull, normally Chase took care of this sort of thing for their team. Even moving to work with the other neurologists hadn't helped to alleviate his dislike of the situation. They all spent more time arguing with each other than working on patients. Maybe Chase was right and most neurologists were pompous asses.

Cameron was perhaps the least equipped to deal with the influx of patients. Being an immunologist made her supremely qualified to do research, lab work, or statistical analysis, but actually dealing with severely injured patients was not high on the list of skills required. She wasn't good at patching people up and moving on quickly. It was in her nature to stay until the patient was 100 better not just stable or put back together. She wanted to answer every question she was asked with caring and honesty, there just wasn't time. Soon Cuddy realized that Cameron wasn't working out as an impromptu ER doctor and moved her on to getting medical histories. This, she much preferred because it allowed her to talk to people and bond with them. She could make them feel better through her caring and kindness rather than slapping a bandage on them and moving to the next down the line. She worked on this until Foreman found her.

Foreman moved on to the next patient, a young girl with dark brown hair and blue eyes. She wore small jeans and a sweatshirt that read, "I love New York" over top of a picture of the New York skyline. He guessed her age around five years old. Her eyes were red and she had clearly been crying. "So, what seems to be the problem?" He asked her quickly, trying to move her out of the way and on to the next patient. She stared at him with big eyes filled with tears. She was cradling her arm. He switched tactics. "What's your name?"

"I want my mummy." She told him in a distinctive borderland accent.

"We'll find her in a minute." He reached for her arm and she kicked out hard, connecting with his upper thigh and just grazing his left testical. She also started screaming. No wonder she had been in an exam room by herself.

"Get away from me. I want my mummy!" She wailed at the top of her lungs in a piercing childlike voice.

Foreman backed out slowly, trying to catch his breath. Once the fear of blinding pain subsided he decided to bring in the re enforcements. He went looking for Cameron. He found her sitting down with a family discussing someone's allergies. He had no remorse interrupting her. He could think of few things worse than being trapped with a patient's family, trying to wring useful information out of them while they whine and cry.

"Cameron, I need you." She excused herself and walked over to a still slightly hunched Dr. Foreman. "I have a patient I need you to look at for me."

"Why, are they having some sort of allergenic reaction?" She questioned as she followed Foreman down the hallway. "Do they need lab work done?" She tried again after Foreman shook his head.

"No, she needs someone with no balls." Foreman said as he opened the door.

Cameron turned and smiled devilishly back at her friend. "You should have called Chase then."

Foreman looked down at his watch and decided, that he and Cameron were taking a break when they were finished with this kid. It was nearly five and he had been working for two hours without a break. He needed a drink and to pee.

Not two minutes past before he heard screaming, thump, and Cameron emerged, rubbing the side of her face, a small fist mark visible in red. "Maybe we should get Chase." Foreman suggested, hating to admit that generally speaking, Chase was the best with difficult patients.

"Yes, let's not keep all this fun to ourselves." She agreed, assuming that Chase was somewhere relaxing rather than actually working.

The two headed downstairs to find their missing compatriot only to be met with a whirlwind of activity, sites, and smells. It took them three tries to get someone to even stop long enough to talk to them and even then, the nurse just pointed them in a vague direction where they found all of the intensivists, even Dr. Gardner, who had left for maternity leave four days earlier.

Cameron was slightly put off by the gruff, business like manner of all the staff down here and was about to turn around and try her luck with the bratty child again, when they found Dr. Standish. Foreman immediately approached him. "Dr. Standish, we are looking for Dr. Chase. We need to borrow him for a few." The normally jovial man seemed subdued but was more than helpful.

"He's in Bay 3. Have him take a break when you are done with him. He hasn't had one yet." The man went back to working on an older woman with multiple burns.

"Thank you." Cameron called to the elder doctor as they headed towards Bay 3. The two paused by the curtain, able to look in, but Chase was too busy to notice them. He was working on a woman in her early 30's with severe burns on the lower half of her body. He had three IVS opened and her BP was still in the toilet. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that she wasn't going to make it, even though she seemed relatively alert.

"So, what's your name?" He asked her as her as he tried desperately to figure out what was tanking her blood pressure. He had no x-rays, no CAT Scans, no MRIs and no ultrasound. He was working blind.

"Francis." She answered through clenched teeth. She was pretty and clearly wealthy.

"Nice name, I'm Dr. Chase. I'll be working on you."

"Lucky me. At least I have a nice piece of art to look at."

"My name's Robert, not Art." He joked with her as he finally found that there was a massive pulmonary bleed. She was bleeding into her lungs and the fluid would eventually collapse her them and suffocate her even with treatment. The IVs were the only thing preventing her from bleeding to death but they were adding to the fluid that was collecting in and around them.

"I didn't say your name was Art, I said you were a piece of art. A very beautiful piece of art." She told him, gazing up at him. Foreman covered his mouth to snicker, even as Cameron was riveted watching her fellow duckling work on the patient.

"You shouldn't talk to me like that, you're married." He pointed at her hand as he hailed April over to get him some morphine.

"I can look, I just can't touch." She was shivering from shock.

"You're a flirt." He teased her with a smile as he took the needle from April and injected far more morphine than necessary. "This is to help with the pain and let you sleep. Do you know if your husband has been contacted yet?" He asked her.

"He was in the car beside me. I don't know where he is." Her eyes filled with tears.

"What's his name? We'll find him for you, don't worry. Just try and relax." He told her as he discarded the needle and brushed her hair back from her forehead with a gloved hand. He smeared her own blood on her forehead but it wasn't like it mattered. She would never wake up again to see it. In almost no time her eyes were closed and he looked up and shook his head "no" at Carol. The nurse understood and wheeled the gurney to another bay, where her death wouldn't disturb the living and Chase got ready to move to the next patient.

Foreman pushed his way in before Chase could start on the next person. Cameron hung back a moment, wiping her eyes. When she had first come to PPTH, she had been slightly put out that she was never rated as the patient's favourite doctor when it came time for discharge reviews and surveys. They rarely asked to have her do the aftercare and sometimes they even asked for second opinions. It had galled her that Chase was almost consistently the highest rated doctor on the team at least by the patients, even if she and Foreman tended to not think that much of his skills. Patients loved him and thought he walked on water. She couldn't understand it until the first time she had watched Chase, when he hadn't known she was there. She had never realized how kind and empathetic he could be with people. That was why she couldn't reconcile his kindness with his basically giving up on his last patient.

"Time for a break, blondie." Foreman told him, trying not to consider the implications of that much morphine on that depressed of a system.

"Foreman?" Chase looked up squinting. He had not even heard the other doctor approach.

"Come on." Foreman motioned for the Aussie to follow him.

"I'm busy. I don't need a break yet." He protested. The young man in front of him couldn't be more than 15 years old. He had a chance, if Chase could find a surgeon to get him into and OR immediately.

"We need you upstairs, Chase, for a consult." Cameron told him, gently tugging on his sleeve. She was not comfortable being down here. There were too many people that needed help. She wouldn't know where to expend her considerable energy. This was definitely more fast pace and stressful than she was used to. Her short stint through the ER in med school had been enough to dissuade her from ever wanting to work in a place like this again.

Chase was going to protest again that there were too many patients and not enough doctors. He had to stay down here but he felt a small hand on his arm and looked down. "It's ok, Chase. Go take a breather. I'll take over for you." Dr. Hope Gardner said. She was perhaps Chase's best friend in the hospital, a fellow intensivist and wicket gin rummy player. She always brought him home cooked meals and tried to fix him up with cute nurses. She was the only person that called to check on him a few weeks ago when he was out with strep throat and she was also 9 months pregnant with twins.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm fine. Go get some coffee, take a walk, and play with your fellow housekeepers. I think I can do my job for awhile." She teased him.

"Promise you'll call if you get tired. I'll be back in 15 minutes."

"Half and hour." She corrected him and set to work.

Chase followed Foreman and Cameron through the curtain and out into the ward. The other two made their way quickly to stairs, while Chase lingered for a moment in front of another curtained bay. This one was dark, quiet and deathly still. On impulse he crossed himself and hurried after the other two before they realized he was lagging behind.

He pushed through the heavy steal door of the stairwell and found Cameron and Foreman waiting for him on the other side. The concrete stairwell was dim and quiet compared to hustle and bustle of the ER. It took Chase a moment to adjust to the change. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, noticing that he still had a bottle of morphine in it. "What did you guys need?" He asked. He wasn't in the mood to talk but he wanted the other two to stop staring at him. Did they see that he had purposely overdosed the last woman he had worked on? Did they approve? Did they even understand why he had done it? She wasn't the first, and he had a horrible nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach that she wouldn't be the last either.

"We have a patient upstairs and we need a consult." Foreman told him. He felt petty and foolish for pulling Chase away from critical patients just to bust his balls by making him deal with a bratty child. But, there was a part of him that realized that Chase probably needed to be taken away from all that death and stress for a few minutes. He thanked God, that he had chosen neurology, where you had time to think and study rather than make snap decisions like Chase was being forced to do. Foreman didn't even want to think of what the therapy bills for the entire hospital would be like after this.

"You need a consult from me?" Chase questioned.

"Yes." Cameron answered, feeling a bit out of place. Ever since Foreman had been promoted briefly and she had slept with Chase, she felt strange around them both. She felt like she needed to defer to Foreman and to defend Chase. The problem was that often those two impulses were at odds with each other. She usually chose to side with Foreman because she usually agreed more with him. This rarely seemed to not bother Chase, which in turn bothered her. She didn't want to think that their one night had meant absolutely nothing to him.

"What's going on?" The Aussie asked. The two were acting strange. He really didn't think he could handle a fight with them right now. He could just here Foreman blaming him that he had let Francis die because he was too lazy to help her and Cameron guilt him by saying that Francis's husband would never be the same without her. It wasn't like he didn't know these things. They didn't understand. There was nothing he could have done. The time it would have taken to work on her would have cost at least three other people their lives and there was still no guarantee she would live. He had been making that same type of decision for hours now and just thinking about it and everything else made him want to throw up. "Do you have the file?"

"Here." Foreman handed it the younger doctor. He noticed that Chase seemed anxious and uncomfortable. He wondered if the blonde thought they were going to go after him for putting that woman out of her misery? He wouldn't. He probably would have done the same thing that Chase had, only without all the talking. There was nothing that could be done for her so there was no reason to waste time on her. It was an inefficient use of a resource. Chase had to see that.

"All is says is that she might have a broken arm?" He paused. "She is awake and alert. Why do you need me?"

"She was being difficult. You're good with kids. And I think she may be from Australia too." Cameron offered from Chase's left. She was having a hard time looking at him. He had just let a woman die for no reason. She was still talking and breathing, there was still hope. She had seen her fellow duckling pull people back from much worse shape. Why had he given up on that lady? She was disgusted that Chase thought a few smiles and some banter could make up for his utter lack of effort to save her.

"You couldn't find anyone else?" He snapped. Both of the other two stared at him like he had grown a second head. Chase didn't snap at people. He didn't yell, he didn't get mad, he didn't do anything. Chase was always calm and even no matter what. He immediately forced himself to relax. He needed to tone down or they would start to realize how hard he was taking this. He knew he didn't have a right to take it any worse than anyone else because they were all in it together. He knew he would be expected to be strong and emotionless in the face of death and suffering so he made sure that he was. "Let's go look at her." He said mildly and headed upstairs.

The three reached the room and Chase paused outside, taking a purple glove from Foreman's pocket and blowing it up into a large hand shaped balloon. He then tied the end off with tape and quickly penned a cute face with a surgical marker. Cameron had always distrusted Chase's penchant for uses toys and distractions when dealing with younger patients. She preferred to spend time with them and get them to trust her. She hadn't had to use anything to make Andy like her but Chase had to bribe her with tickets to see bugs or something.

Chase opened the door a crack and squeezed the glove, which now looked a bit like a chicken, through the space. "Mind if we come in?" He asked the little girl. He could hear her crying.

"Go away!" She yelled.

"Can't. Mr. Chicken here is missing his mate and needs to see if he is in there. Can we come in just for a minute?" He asked again. He bobbed the chicken-glove up and down every time he talked.

"Ok." She said, but scooted back as far as she could on the table. Chase poked his head in, making sure she wasn't going to throw anything at him. He then slowly entered, shutting the door behind him. He moved towards the cupboards and started to look through them.

"Sorry about this, we'll be out of your way in a moment." He mock apologized. He then sighed. "Can you hold him for a moment?" He handed her the chicken-glove. She took it with her good hand and looked at it, tipping it from one side to the other. "Thank you." He continued to rummage through the drawers till he found what he was looking for, a blue glove. He blew it up and started to make a second one but didn't say anything to her.

Soon, the natural curiosity of children won out over her fear, mostly because Chase wasn't staring at her and was keeping his distance. "What are you doing?" She asked in a small voice, choked with tears. She snuffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Chase pulled some tissues out of a dispenser on the counter and handed them to her, still not making eye contact.

"I'm making him a friend. He's here by himself and needs a friend to keep him company. This place isn't nearly as scary if you have a friend." He commented as he started to draw exaggerated eyelashes on the girl chicken.

"Why are you helping him?" She questioned again, her tears slowing.

"Because I'm a doctor. I like to help people." He gave her a shy smile. "Besides, like I said, it's kind of scary around here if you don't have a friend and I don't have one either."

"Me either." She said dejectedly.

"My name is Dr. Chase, by the way, what's yours?" He sat down on the stool so he was now at her level, not towering over her. He well remembered how scary it could be to be a child alone in a hospital. When he was a little boy, his mother had often injured herself while drinking or doing drugs. He would go with her to hospital and sit in the waiting room praying and hoping his father would come and find them. He remembered that seeing the doctors standing all around him, while he sat, staring down at him and talking was very scary. It made him feel like he couldn't ask them questions or even talk to them like people. It was unbelievably intimidating. Because of that, he made it a point to always try and put his patients and their families at ease. He made sure not to stand over them but sit beside them if he could, like with Gabe and Luke. He tried to talk to them like people, not specimens like he had down with Kayla. And he tried to make sure that he took pauses for questions in conversations so that they were more like discussions rather than a doctor talking at a patient. These were simple things that made people feel infinitely more comfortable around him than they did around Foreman or even Cameron. House had recognized these things early on and noticed that of all his fellows, Chase had a bedside manner the most like Wilson's.

"Diana Mansfield." She told him and finally made eye contact with him.

"Diana like the princess?" He asked her.

"Yes. My mummy named me after her."

"Well you're mum must be very smart then, I'm sure you are a little princess too." He smiled at her again.

"You talk funny. Are you from London? Daddy says people down there talk like they have marbles in their mouths."

"I most certainly am not from London. I am from Melbourne, Australia. And I do not talk funny. Americans talk funny." He winked at her, noticing that she had her head tilted to one side. "Do you know where your mummy and daddy are?" He asked her.

"No." Her eyes started to tear up again. "We were on a bus with other people from our group and then mummy was handing me to someone and I don't know what happened." She started to cry in earnest again.

"Shhhh, sweetheart, don't cry. We'll find them They may have been taken to another hospital or they could be here looking for you. But I'm sure they would want you to be a big girl and be very brave for them." He told her as he sat beside her on the table. He tried to ignore the fact that Cameron and Foreman were watching through the window. They were making him nervous.

Soon she turned around and buried her face in his side and cried even louder. "I don't know how to be brave. I want my mummy."

"I know. I bet I know what would make you feel better." He smiled at her again even as he rubbed her back. She was getting tears and snot all over his lab coat, which sort of grossed him out. He was very good with kids, but he didn't really like them per se. All of the crying, leaking, and whining quickly started to grate on his nerves.

"What." Her eyelids were drooping and she was leaning more and more against him.

"Why don't you let me take a look at your arm? If it is hurt, I can help." He suggested.

"Ok." She sniffled, still not letting go of the chicken-glove. She allowed him to take her wounded arm in his now gloved hands. It wad definitely broken.

"We need to get you an x-ray." She started to look like she would cry again. "Don't worry. It won't hurt and he can go with you to keep you company." He pointed to the inflated glove.

"Ok." She mumbled and leaned over, vomiting on Chase's shoes and the left leg of his scrubs. He rolled his eyes skyward and tried to remember that it wasn't her fault.

"She'll be right, honey. Just calm down." He mumbled as he quickly cleaned up the mess. He then sat down beside her again to clean her face off. He noticed then, that one of her eyelids was drooping farther than the other. At first he had assumed that her eyelids were low because she was tired but the unevenness of it worried him. "Diana, sweetheart, can you look at my finger?" He held his index finger out in front of her face and made her follow it from side to side and then up and down. Her eyes were not tracking smoothly and one pupil didn't move. "Did you hit your head at all?"

"I don't know." She mumbled. He stood up to hail Foreman in. "Don't go." She called after him, grasping at his coattail.

"Don't worry. I'm just going to get a friend of mine, Dr. Foreman. He is going to help me make you better." He explained as Foreman entered. She ducked behind Chase. "Don't be afraid, Dr. Foreman is a very nice man. He won't hurt you."

"I'm more worried about her hurting me." Foreman smiled and joked, keeping one eye on the kid's feet. "What's going on?"

"Horizontal and vertical nystagmus, ptsosis, head tilting, left pupil is fixed and unreactive, vomiting, and memory loss." Chase explained quickly.

"It could be neurological." Foreman commented,

"That would be why I called the neurologist." He snipped. Wanting to change his pants. "Get her a CAT Scan. My 'break' is almost over. I have to get back downstairs." Chase turned to the frightened little girl. "Dr. Foreman is going to take care of you for awhile so be brave for him. I'm going to go try and find your parents." He lied to her.

"Bye bye." She said childishly to him. He waved and smiled, heading out of the room.

Cameron stopped him as soon as he exited the door. "Do you need help finding her parents?" She asked.

"What?"

"The little girl's parents, you said you were going to find them."

"I lied. I need to find some pants that don't have puke on them." He headed towards the laundry to find a new set of scrubs.

"But you told her."

"I have to go back downstairs. If you feel so horrible about her being alone, you find them." He snapped, not looking forward to the prospect of heading back to the war zone that was the ER but guilt driving him to return as quickly as possible.

"Fine, I will." She turned and walked off, determined to find the little girls parent. She did this the same time Foreman tried to figure out the puzzle of what was causing her symptoms and Chase worked to save people who couldn't see him and would never remember him.

TBC


	2. Sticky Wicket

A/N: Ok, here is part two. I know Cameron came out kind of bad in part one but that is for three reasons. 1. I'm not good at writing Cameron because she is so inconsistent on the show. 2. I don't like her and think she is a waste and an insult to professional women everywhere. 3. I wanted to redeem her in later chapters. So enjoy.

**Storms 2**

Foreman used his time to examine Diana. The symptoms could be from a concussion at best or bleeding in the brain at worst. He needed a CAT Scan to know for sure, which meant going head to head against nurse Brenda Previn. Generally speaking, Foreman preferred to stay at least three hundred yards away from the second floor head nurse. She was mean, snappy, and just plain spiteful at times but she handled all the scheduling. Foreman was sure that Brenda purposely waited for him to show up just so she could say no to him. What made the whole thing worse was that she was always nice to Cameron and Chase. But not having any other choice, he steeled his courage and walked up to her. In many ways, she was more frightening than House.

"I need a CAT Scan." He told her, after waiting in the queue for nearly 10 minutes.

"No, next." She told him without looking up.

"Why?" He snapped, spoiling for a fight.

"Emergency scans take precedence."

"This is an emergency."

"I can only schedule scan from emergency room doctors, trauma surgeons, or intensivists. NEXT" She yelled. Foreman stalked off.

Of all rotten things that had happened today, this had to be the icing on the cake. He would have to get Chase to order the scan for him. What a freaking crock. He had been Chase's boss and now he had to go ask him to order a test. God hated him. That was all there was to it. He pondered as he again headed downstairs. He figured it would be faster to just walk down there than wait for Chase to answer a page.

It was easier this time, he knew what to expect and he knew where Chase was, but what wasn't easier was seeing the state of Chase's current patient. The man was so badly burned that his clothes were melted on to him and had the decided smell of cooking pork. Chase was trying to calm the man down enough to find out what other injuries he had. In the end, the Aussie just gave him morphine and sent him to the Burn Unit to deal with, rude but practical.

"Chase." Foreman called as he pulled on gloves and helped Chase insert another IV onto the next patient, an older woman with a badly broken pelvis. Her pulse was thready and fast and her skin was waxy with a sweaty sheen. "Shock?" He asked.

"Yup." Chase answered looking at the chart quickly. "Ms. Madison?" he questioned, trying to get her to respond. She looked over at him. "Look at me. I'm Dr. Chase. You're at Prince Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. You've been in an accident. Can you speak?" She tried but nothing more than a gurgle came out. "That's ok. I want you to tug on my sleeve if I hurt you." He placed her hand on his sleeve and started palpating her abdomen.

"Where am I" She finally managed to gasp.

"You are at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital." He answered as he moved towards her chest. She gasped in pain when he got her sternum.

"What happened?" She asked.

"There was an accident." He told her as he wrote down his findings on a chart.

"Where am I?" She asked again. Foreman rolled his eyes.

"You should probably add possible head trauma to that." He commented.

"Already there. You are at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. There was an accident. I need you to relax for me. We'll take good care of you." He told her as he gave her some pain killers. "Send her up to radiology." He told Carol. He looked over as Foreman stood beside another patient, a young boy in a New York Nix jersey. "What are you doing down here. I thought all the smart doctors were staying upstairs so us grunts could do the dirty work?" He asked snidely, not in a giving mood. He felt like he was going to scream if he had to repeat the name of the hospital one more time.

"I was looking for you. I need you to order the x-ray and CAT Scan for that kid." He told him sheepishly.

"Did you piss off Brenda again?" Chase asked as he looked through one chart then moved to another. The first person was too far gone for help but he set to work on the second.

"No. She said that only ER docs, trauma surgeons, and intensivists had radiology privileges right now. Seeing as I am none of them, that leaves you to sign for it." Foreman explained as he took the chart from Chase and looked over it. This one had massive internal bleeding and a possible collapsed lung.

Chase stared at him for a moment. "I just want to take his moment to revel in the fact you need my help." He smiled evilly.

"I've asked for your help before." Foreman pointed out indignantly.

"No, you have told me to do things or pawned off tasks you haven't wanted to do on me. There is a huge difference."

"I needed your help with Mary the swimmer."

"Doesn't count because I got chewed out by House about helping you afterwards. Plus, that was something I should have been doing anyway. This is something that you can't do and need me to do. Something the big wig neurologist needs the lowly intensivist to do. Wow, something that a doctor who studies the brain needs to have done by a doctor that, what was it you said about my specialty?" Foreman couldn't help but blush a bit, luckily it was hard to tell. "Oh yes, that intensivists were nothing more than a mutant cross between and ER doctor and an anesthesiologist that had gone retarded. And that all we ever did was crisis management until a smarter doctor came along to actually cure the patient?" He teased. Foreman had said some rather scathing things about Chase and his specialty in the past and Chase was not above rubbing his fellow duckling's nose in it.

"Are you going to sign the order or not?" Foreman groused. He had said those things right after he had arrived. Before Chase, he had rarely ever worked with an intensivist and was a little fuzzy on what they did. He now realized that it was a fairly complicated specialty that required knowledge of all major systems and how they interact with each other in addition to all the practical knowledge of how to do minor surgeries on the fly or sit in on major surgeries as back up.

"Of course I'll sign, why wouldn't I?" Chase commented as he started in on the next patient, for some reason Foreman stayed to help.

Upstairs, Cameron tried to find the girls parents. She had checked in with all the nurses' stations and talked to anyone and everyone she could think of but nothing had shaken loose. She was just about to sit down and start phoning other hospitals when she decided that she would talk to Diana again and see if she could find anything out from her. She approached the room and stopped herself before she walked straight in. She was still royally annoyed that Chase had gotten the girl to open up but she hadn't. She was a much nicer and more caring person than Chase and it plan annoyed her that people saw her as weak because of it but hailed Chase as the saviour for making a kid laugh. Stupid double standards!

She opened the door and walked in. Diana glared at her, hugging the chicken protectively. "Hello, Diana, I'm Alison. I need to ask you a few questions." She closed the door behind her.

"Go away." Diana mumbled at the lady doctor, her speech sounding strange.

"It will just take a minute." She smiled sweetly and tried to make eye contact. Chase was right her eye lids did look droopy.

'GO AWAY! LEAVE ME ALONE!" She screamed at Cameron, going so far as to kick her small feet out in the direction of the tall doctor. Cameron decided on the better part of valour and retreated through the door, even more irate than before. She stalked off to find Foreman to see if maybe he had found out anything new.

She found Foreman and Chase standing in the queue for ordering tests. They were discussing some other case that Cameron didn't know about. She didn't hesitate to push her way over to them. She knew all the male doctors would move out of the way for her and the female ones would be quiet, when they realized where she was going. Foreman smiled at her. "Any luck finding the kid's parents?"

"Not yet. But her speech is mumbled and slurred now. I think we need and MRI too." She commented.

"Are you sure it isn't just the accent throwing you off? I thought goldilocks here was drunk the first few times I talked to him." He waved his thumb towards Chase. Foreman and Chase both had a habit of falling back on dark humour to get through tough times. The only difference was that Chase tended to not have the best track record when it came to whom it was and wasn't appropriate to crack a joke in front of.

"No, I'm sure it is slurring. It could mean her brain is swelling beyond a mere concussion. We need an MRI." She stated.

"CAT Scan is faster. Have you seen these lines? It can give us the preliminaries of what we need." Foreman defended. The two continued to bicker about which test to run and Chase stayed out of it even after he ordered both tests.

Just as luck would have it, Chase happened to look up long enough to notice one of the waiting patient's shirts. It was a white, long-sleeved shirt with three lions under a crown. The letters "ECB" were in bold face under it. Chase narrowed his eyes and walked over towards the man, Cameron and Foreman followed still arguing about the best tests to tell Chase to run. The blonde stood beside the man, who was pale with dark hair and a nasty gash along his forehead, and mumbled to no one in particular. "It isn't bad enough that we lost The Ashes but now this bloody bloke has to come in here and bugger me with it?" The man looked up at him immediately as did the woman by his side. Cameron and Foreman stopped their bickering and stared slacked jawed at him.

"Did you just have a stroke?" Foreman asked him, recognizing the words that Chase had spoken but not the order in which they were used.

"No I didn't have stroke. His shirt, it's for the English National Cricket Team. During The Tests, we lost The Ashes to them this year for the first time 16 years. It was bullocks." He pouted and Foreman continued to eye him as if he had gone crazy. "Think of it like The Stanley Cup you yanks give out for baseball only it's a 10 cm red urn and it, unfairly I might add, always stays in England."

"The Stanley Cup is hockey not baseball." Foreman corrected, still thinking Chase had lost his mind. The seated man seemed to understand though.

"It's about time you Aussies let someone else have a go at it and if we let you take it, you'd probably just drink beer out it." The seated man intoned smartly. The woman beside him looked about ready to snap his neck for talking about sports at a time like that.

"You're probably right, mate." Chase smiled and held his had out, "I'm Dr. Chase." He offered. He recognized his accent as being from the borderlands of England as well. "You wouldn't happen to be missing an ankle biter about this tall" he held his hand out to around waist level, "with brown hair, blue eyes, and apparently a mean right cross?"

"You've seen Diana?" The woman jumped up.

"We were just discussing the little princess herself." He smiled at them as they hugged each other.

"Is she alright? Where is she? Can we see her?" The two asked together.

"She is on her way up to radiology for some x-rays and a CAT Scan." Foreman answered for them. He naturally assumed that they would prefer to talk to him rather than Cameron or a nonsense talking, scatterbrained intensivist.

"Why does she need x-rays? What happened to her?" Her mother asked, frantic. "Take me to her, now. I want to see my baby!" Foreman was starting to see a marked family resemblance.

"Mrs. Mansfield, Mr. Mansfield?" Chase questioned. They nodded that was indeed their correct names. "Radiology is on the third floor but is very crowded right now. Our radiologists are working nonstop to accommodate all the tests they are having to run. Even in the best of circumstances all you would be allowed to do is stay outside in the hall while she was having the tests performed but now we can't even allow you on the floor. The best thing you can do for her right now is to use this time to get yourselves together and relaxed. When she is finished, she will be taken up to the pediatric unit on the 6th floor. There is a waiting room almost directly above us, go up there and tell the volunteer your names and her name. That way we will know how and where to find you."

"But my husband is hurt." She pointed to the large gash on Mr. Mansfield's head.

"Stop coddling me, I'll be fine."

Chase looked around and bit the corner of his lip. Foreman and Cameron could tell he was going to do something they would probably regret. "Come here." He motioned for them to follow him as he ducked into the stairwell. "Where does it hurt and what happened?" He asked once they were out of the way.

"I hit my head. Never passed out. I've had worse from rugby." The man shrugged meaty his shoulders. Chase had no doubt that Mr. Mansfield probably had.

Chase pressed his fingers around the wound gauging the man's pain. "Any dizziness or double vision?"

"Naw, mate." He followed Chase's fingers and stared into his penlight. "It's just a gash."

"I'm inclined to agree." The blonde answered. Foreman shook his head as well, concurring that the wound was superficial at best. Cameron would have preferred a more detailed test and maybe a CAT Scan or MRI but she figured that if Foreman the neurologist couldn't get one then there was no way an immunologist could. "I'm going to use a type of skin glue on here." Chase pulled out a wrapped tube from his pocket. "This will leave a nastier scar but doesn't require the time or anesthetic that stitches do, plus it heals faster." He cleaned the wound and applied the glue. Mr. Mansfield didn't flinch. Foreman had to wonder why Chase had all this stuff in his pockets.

"You still haven't told us what is wrong with Diana?" Her mother questioned again.

"She has a broken arm, probably a double fracture of her forearm but she still had feeling in all her fingers and good circulation. More troubling is that she has a head wound. She seemed disoriented and lethargic. It could be as simple as a concussion but we need to make sure." He tried to set her mind at ease.

"Oh dear God." She said. "I have to see her."

"Dr. Chase already told you, the radiology department is off limits right now. We will let you know as soon as she is finished." Cameron answered for Chase because he had a pair of scissors in his mouth.

"I don't care about your damn limits. I am going to see my daughter." The woman glared at Cameron. She was shorter and much homelier than the willowy doctor but just has tough with the typical bad teeth and broad arse of Northern England.

"Mrs. Mansfield, we understand your desire to see your daughter but you will have to wait like everyone else." Foreman tried to placate the situation. Chase just picked up his phone and dialed a number. There was a short pause and the sound of someone answering.

"Hey, mate. Can you do me a favour? I need you to check the ETA on my patient, Diana Mansfield." There was a pause. "Yeah, a little girl," another pause. "That long, huh? Ok, ok, can you have one of the nurses move her over to the door by the northeast stairwell?" "You're right you don't want to know why." He smiled and chuckled.

Both Cameron and Foreman had a fairly good idea what Chase was doing. Their fellow duckling was well liked throughout the hospital and had as many ardent admirers around the hospital as Cameron did. One of those was a radiology resident named Jenny. He was clearly calling in a favour from her.

"Come on," he motioned for them to follow him up the stairs. "I'll sneak you onto the floor so you can see her but just for a moment." Chase explained as he started up the stairs.

"Chase, they really shouldn't be on the floor." Foreman began to protest. He had had his fill of breaking the rules, when he had been in charge.

"You saw how upset she was, seeing her parents will calm her down and make the tests go more smoothly." Chase countered as he held his badge up to open the door. "Wait here for a moment. I'll be right back." He smiled at the parents and headed through the door.

"Chase." Cameron called as she followed him. "You can't move her, she needs those tests."

"I'm not moving her far, just to the door by the stairwell. Besides, I thought you of all people would applaud my bleeding heart for wanting to reunite a family." He teased her and she glared at him.

Soon, they found the little girl, lying on a gurney looking miserable. She ignored Foreman, glared at Cameron, and perked up when she saw Chase. Cameron was slightly put out by her treatment but Foreman realized that it had more to do with the girl's comfort zones then any of them in particular. Chase looked like a handsome prince from a Disney movie and sounded a lot more like what she was used to than a guy from LA and a girl from Chicago.

"Hello, your majesty." Chase joked, sketching a mock bow to the little girl named after a princess. "We have some subjects that would like an audience with the princess." She looked confused. "There are some people who wanted to see you." He winked as he began to role her bed towards the stairwell.

"Who?" She asked, still admiring the crudely drawn unicorn Chase had used to mark which arm to x-ray. He had used the purple surgical marker rather than the black x-ray marker. It was a common mistake, especially for Chase. His reoccurring problems with the pens was one of several clues that had finally led Foreman to realize that Chase was borderline Deuteranopious or borderline colour blind. Chase wasn't the classic red/green type but the more subtle type that couldn't tell different shades of colours apart. He often mixed up greens and greys or purples and blues. It had made perfect sense when House had teased the Aussie about it. It explained his lousy fashion sense, why he usually used the black and white few on the MRIs, and why his entire apartment was decorated in grey. Because of this, Chase usually left surgical tape on the end of his purple surgical marker to tell it apart from the black marker. At least once a weak, House would switch them around just to be mean. It appeared House had struck recently. Foreman decided not to say anything, there was no reason to embarrass Chase for something that was a physiological short coming.

Chase didn't answer her until he opened the door to the stairwell. "Do you know these people?" He asked innocently.

"Mummy! Daddy!" She shrieked and the family embraced each other. All thoughts that Chase shouldn't have broken the rules now lost in the glow of bringing joy to a patient.

"So you wanted me to help you sneak people onto my floor?" Jenny asked from behind them. "You are so naughty, Dr. Chase." She joked, trying to seem suave and cool. She had a crush rivaling Cameron's for House on Chase.

"You know you like it, when I'm naughty, mate." He smiled at her. He had no clue she was interested in him. "Can you page Foreman when you are ready for her?" He asked, wanting to let the family stay together as long as possible.

"Sure. Two people before her I'll page Foreman and she can get back in line."

"Thanks, you're my mate." He told her and headed back into the stairwell to return to the ER.

"No, but I would really like to be." He mumbled after him. Cameron smiled, feeling smug and superior because she had gotten into his pants. There had been three main reasons she had chosen Chase when she went for her drug induced fling. 1. She knew he would come, if she called. 2. There was a small piece of her that, on a merely physical level, had wanted to bone him, since the moment she met him. 3. The bragging rights of having gotten into his knickers, when every other doctor and nurse around her had failed.

"Trust me, you really don't. He grinds his teeth, when he sleeps." Cameron threw in and followed Chase out of the door. Jenny shot Cameron a nasty look and Foreman gave her a sympathetic one. He was firmly convinced that there were few things meaner, nastier, and more evil than two women who wanted the same guy. Not that Cameron really wanted Chase, she just didn't want anyone else to have him and not that Chase even noticed. He still lived off in his blonde little world where Jenny did him favours because he was nice to her and beautiful sheilas bought him drinks because they were friendly. Or that House really didn't mean all of his sexual innuendos but that might just be a defense mechanism on Chase's part and Foreman didn't blame him in the least.

The three left the family together and went back to the grind of the working through the wounded. The new arrivals were petering out, so now Chase was turning towards prepping donors for surgery or setting critical patients who had just arrived in recovery.

10:37 pm December 1, 2005

Foreman got the call that radiology was ready for Diana. He trudged back up the stairs and found her where he had left her. Her parents beside her, looking pleased that she had calmed down. He gave them a small smile and walked towards them, trying to remember their names. He didn't have Cameron's head for names. He remembered it was something typically British sounding but he had looked at so many charts he was drawing a blank.

"Hello, they are ready for her now." He tried to fudge his way through using no names. He put his hand on the railing of the gurney and she lashed out at him screaming. Her mother grabbed her arm, forcing it back down.

"Diana, that is no way to act." She scolded. "I'm sorry Dr. I don't know what has gotten into her. She isn't acting like herself and she keeps screaming." Her mother made excuses as she as she stroked her daughter's hair. Foreman felt a sinking feeling in his gut as he examined the little girl's eyes and noticed her pupils didn't react and the way her hands had started to curl under towards her arms. The screaming was just the last straw.

"We'll do what we can." He wheeled her towards the CAT Scanner, afraid it was useless because they had been forced to wait too long.

He sat in the booth with the techs as they performed the test and then bullied his way into an MRI, even though he didn't need to. It was clear; she had a large piece of her skull embedded in her brain. There were bleeds all around it. Even with surgery, she was dead. He wheeled her out and had her set up in a room in pediatrics. He then called Chase and Cameron to confirm. He would need Chase to alert the organ donation board and he thought Cameron would like to be there to see it.

They all convened in their conference room and Foreman put the films up on the light-board. "She's a goner. She dropped two more points on the Glasgow Coma scale in the last hour." Foreman commented sadly. "Chase, you'll have to intubate soon."

"I'll get her set up and call the Organ guys." He said, sweeping her file up to give to the organ donation board. It would be one of their people, rather than a doctor who would talk to the family about organ donation. It just seemed ghoulish to have one of the doctors do it.

"Who's going to tell them?" Foreman asked.

"I guess I will." Chase commented. He would be the best at answering questions about what was going to happen to her anyway since he had the most experience dealing with patients in this situation, plus he already had a rapport with them. He made to leave the room.

"Wait." Cameron said. Still processing what had happened. The girl had just been yelling at her a little over four hours ago. "We should wait a little while longer."

"Why?" Chase asked.

"Because, her condition may change. It may improve. We should call House and see if he has any ideas."

"Mate, the only change that is likely in her condition is from brain dead to completely dead. I'm sorry that you have a hard time dealing with this, but no one has time to coddle you through it." He snapped. Why hadn't he asked Jenny to put Diana through earlier rather than letting her sit in the hallway with her parents?

"I don't expect nor need to be coddled, Chase." She snapped right back. "I just mean that we should wait for a few hours. Give them the peace of having her here until after the holidays are over." She stated. It was clear to her that it was the best course of action. The organ people were at capacity and couldn't do anything for several hours. There was no reason to ruin the family's last holiday together with bad news.

"Absolutely not." Chase said and left to tell them. Cameron hurried after him. Foreman went along to watch if nothing else.

"Chase!" She caught up with him in the stairwell. "Don't be hasty. You are just causing these people grief for no reason. Just give them until Monday. Then you can notify whoever you want." She implored. She had lost her husband just before a holiday and could think of few things worse.

"So you want me to keep them in the dark till Monday? Let them think that everything is right with the world then drop the bomb on them that she's dead?"

"It's the kindest thing we can do for them in this tough situation." She commented. They both turned to Foreman, expecting him to be the tie breaker but he put his hands up, letting them fight it out themselves. He wasn't sure who he agreed with.

"No, I think that is one of the cruelest things we could do to them. We owe them honesty and complete knowledge of what is happening with their daughter."

"You have the nerve to preach honesty. The guy who lies about having his tonsils out." She snapped.

"There is a huge difference between telling a white lie to get a patient to trust you and withholding pertinent medical information from a patient's family."

"A lie is a lie, Chase." She corrected him.

"Maybe in cuddly Cameron land but not in the real world. In the real world we don't keep from terminal cancer patients that they may have terminal cancer because we don't want to tell them nor do we sugar coat the severity of a child's condition, when talking to a parent because we have a problem dealing with it." He barked, reaching for the door. He had a new found hatred for lies of omission to family members. The pain of being kept in the dark about Rowan's condition still fresh for him.

She reached past him and pushed herself between him and the door. His hand was still on the knob but it was behind her back, her hand on top of it. She was inches from his face, close enough to smell his expensive shampoo and see the pale stubble just starting at his jaw. For some reason she was torn between wanting to smack him in the mouth and wanting to run her tongue along his lips. Instead she kept up the verbal parrying. "Is this the same real world where one doctor humiliates his boss and his whole department because he is too lazy and scatterbrained to ask a simple question and ends up killing a patient?" She questioned. His eyes narrowed and she realized that he could easily slam her back and hurt her. Part of her wished he would slam her back and do something else.

Before he could answer, his pager went off with a 911 telling him to get up to the operating theatres on the fifth floor. She moved allowing him to walk away but followed behind him, talking. "Chase, just because you hate your family doesn't mean everyone else does. These people will appreciate these days more than you will understand."

"My job is not to help people appreciate their loved ones. My obligation is to be honest with them and let them know their daughter is dead. The longer we wait the more her organs will deteriorate."

"Is that all you care about, getting her organs? Are you hoping to move to a transplant team, when House finally fires your negligent ass?" She yelled after him.

He stopped and spun around, glaring straight into her eyes. "Oh, but Cam, he wouldn't fire my ass because he prefers it to yours." He quipped and headed off. She finally stopped and turned to Foreman.

"Why didn't you say anything?" She snapped and headed off to prevent Chase from talking to family.

She pestered Chase about her point of view for nearly half an hour, while he worked on readying two patients for transplant surgeries. Without realizing it, she started helping him and their argument was in stark contrast to the smooth an efficient way they worked together. He had then been called into surgery and she unabashedly took the file from his locker so he couldn't give it to the organ board.

Now, Cameron and Foreman relaxed with an everything pizza in their conference room. It had been the first time either of them had taken an extended break in over 12 hours. It was cold now and Chase had been in busy when they had ordered it so they hadn't bothered worrying that he wouldn't have liked their choice in pizzas. Now they felt sort of guilty but oh well. Cameron slipped her shoes off under the table and untied her hair. Foreman always though it made her look much younger to have it unbound.

"So when are you two going to go for a tumble again?" Foreman asked his companion.

Without missing a beat, Cameron answered him around a mouthful. "What makes you think I want to give him another tumble?"

"Please, I thought you were going to start humping his leg in the stairwell, when you two were fighting."

"I was about to strangle him more like it. I am so pissed him right now."

Foreman looked at her from across the table and gave her a shit eating grin. "Being pissed at him has nothing to do with it. I'm not saying that you are in love with him, hell, I'm not saying that you even like him. What I am saying is that you want to screw him again."

"I do not. You know I have feelings for House." Cameron tried to defend herself at the same time as she tried to push all impure thoughts about her co worker out of her head. Only, it was really, really hard sometimes because regardless of his lousy fashion sense and stupid shoes, Chase was one of the most adorably sexy dorks she had ever met.

"I never said you had feeling for him other than lust. I'm not blind or dumb. I've seen the way you look at him."

"How do I look at him?" She tried to scoff.

"Like you are PMSing and he is a giant white chocolate cheesecake."

"No I don't. When have I ever?"

"Two weeks before Christmas when we went out to lunch and the only way you could get Chase to come with us was to go to that awful sushi restaurant." Cameron remembered. It had been the anniversary of when she had joined House's department and she wanted to celebrate. She had asked Foreman out to lunch but Chase had declined, saying he had to work. She had to bribe him by letting him pick the restaurant. He had picked a local Sushi bar, which had greatly annoyed Foreman. Foreman was a standard fare kind of guy and Chase's more refined sense of taste tended to get on his nerves. But the one thing she remembered clearly, was that for some reason, watching Chase delicately wrap his lips around raw, pink fish made her want to fly across the table and jump him. Maybe she had been ovulating. At one rather embarrassing point, she had actually started drooling. She had blamed it on wasabi.

"Ok, so maybe I do. Do you think he has noticed?"

"I doubt it. He's seems pretty dense about that kind of thing. But my point is that you don't have to care about someone to use them as a booty call."

"You don't think that is a little disrespectful towards Dr. Chase?" She asked, again ignoring the fact that was exactly what she had done to him.

"It would be if I had any respect for him."

"Which you don't?" She raised an eyebrow, knowing that Foreman was lying. He may not like Chase but it was clear that Foreman at least respected the Aussie's clever little brain.

"Which I don't. But look at it this way, what dude is going to complain because a gorgeous woman wants to have a no strings attached sexual relationship with him? And, it might even make House jealous enough to make a move on you."

"He wasn't jealous before."

"That was a one night stand and obviously so, but a long term relationship might kick start him into action."

"Yeah, but what will it do to my self esteem when we find out he is more jealous of me getting to sleep with Chase than Chase getting to sleep with me?" She joked, tickled pink by the idea of using Chase to make House jealous.

"That is a valid concern, but better to know now than later." He joked as he handed her a can of Coke. She felt naughty having a full sugar drink.

"Do you really think Chase is interested? He told me that he thought it was better to leave it as a one night thing." An idea was forming in the back of her mind and she needed Foreman's confirmation before she followed through.

"What guy wouldn't be? He probably only said that because he was afraid you were going to shoot him down if he tried again." Foreman tried to bolster her confidence. He liked the idea of Chase and Cameron together. It would help stop Cameron from fixating on House and the awkwardness of it tended to keep Chase out of the office, which was always a plus. But he knew he wasn't being totally honest with her. The dynamic between the two had changed since they had slept together. Before it had always seemed to be Chase sniffing around Cameron and doing nice things to get her attention, now it was reversed. Cameron seemed more interested and was always drooling over him, while he seemed to pretend like nothing had happened. It was clear that Chase was now in control because she wanted him more than he wanted her, and that annoyed Foreman. It made him angry since it showed that Chase was a bit of dick because getting Cameron had been about the hunt, not about her and because now he had the upper hand and Cameron couldn't manipulate him as easily.

"I'm very happy to hear that." She said and she finished her drink and stood up, not tying her hair back into its usual style. "Chase was going back into another transplant surgery right?"

"Yeah, he was working with Ayersman." Foreman supplied.

"Good, come with me." She headed out of the door and Foreman followed out of curiosity. The two walked from their office on the fourth floor to the surgery scrub rooms on the fifth. Just as she had hoped, Chase was alone in the scrub room, sitting down and reading over the Dr. Ayersman's notes on what was to be done. He looked annoyed, which was no surprise. He didn't like Dr. Ayersman and Ayersman didn't like him. The only reason they worked together was because Cuddy had threatened them both with sanctions if they didn't learn to co operate. Dr. Standish often forced them together because Ayersman was the weakest transplant surgeon, while Chase was the best transplant intensivist with the most experience. But maybe with House gone, things would go smoother.

Cameron motioned for Foreman to stand lookout by the door.

"Chase." She called as she walked up to him. He looked up at her through his bangs and the bright overhead lights made his eyes look grey in the way that television lights always made green eyes look blue. She took a deep breath and tried to convince herself that this was all for the patient's family and not for her. She stood over him, trying to affect a relaxed air. "I wanted to talk to you."

"I was afraid of that from the moment you walked in here." He quipped as he also rose and headed towards the lockers.

She followed him, admiring the view from behind. When he reached his locker she pressed in close behind him, letting her breath tickle his neck. "Just give them till the morning of the second. That's all I ask?" She could smell the antiseptic soap on him and enjoyed his involuntary shiver. But he said nothing, only turned around to face her. "Please, Chase, I can make it worth your while." She leaned forward, attempting to run kisses up his neck but he ducked out of the way.

"So keeping this child on life support for some stupid holiday is worth you whoring yourself?" He asked coldly. He was royally annoyed with Cameron right now. He sympathized with her not wanting to tell the Mansfields the bad news, but he didn't think it was fair to keep leading them on that their daughter might get better just so that Cameron didn't feel guilty. There was no medical basis for it and to him letting them live in ignorance of what was coming was just plain cruel.

Cameron was slightly taken aback for a moment, from House that comment wouldn't have even registered. She had a mental e-mail filter that ignored all sexually charged or vaguely hurtful comments from the elder doctor. However, hearing Chase say something like that was upsetting. Chase rarely said means things to people, but when he did, he made them stick. She pressed on though, her goal more important than her feelings. "I'm not whoring myself, Chase." She ran a hand under his scrubs, trying to loosen the long sleeved shirt he had under them. "I just thought you looked stressed out and could stand a stress reliever." This time she managed to at least make contact with her mouth. His skin was smooth and soft, bringing back memories of the best sex she had ever had.

"Cameron, why are you doing this?" Part of him wanted to crawl out of his skin from her touch and part of him wanted to crawl inside of her.

"I just think we both need to relax, so we can think more clearly. Then, you'll see that I'm right." She captured his mouth in a deep kiss that ended in a slight nip on his bottom lip. At that point, he lost about a pint of blood from his brain, not a good thing for a doctor about to go into a delicate surgery. But more than anything he was annoyed. He was so tired of Cameron and her emotional terrorism. He was tired of the fact that she treated you like a cold blooded murderer if you didn't fit into her narrow, black and white view of the world. And most of all he was tired of fighting with people that should respect him but didn't no matter how much he tried to make them. So he gave up.

"No matter what you do, I'm still going to tell them that she is brain dead, when I am done in surgery." Chase told her.

She had to fight not to snarl at him. For some reason, on the few attempts he had made to ever say 'no' to someone, she thought he always came across like a petulant child. Maybe it was the pouty lips, who knew. "But I can think of far more interesting things for you to do with that wonderful mouth of yours." She cooed at him, trying one last time, working her tongue around the pulse point just under his ear.

"I have to be in surgery in about 10 minutes. So if I go down on you for 8 of them will you shut up and leave me alone?" He snapped, trying to think about anything other than throwing her up against the lockers and making her cum until she screamed.

Her first inclination was to slap him silly, her second was to say that 'yes', it would get her to leave him alone about it for roughly 8 minutes. But she went with her final thought, which was to glare at him and storm out.

"So, how did it go? Is he going to give you the weekend or not?" Foreman asked from the doorway.

"We haven't decided yet." She answered, refusing to believe that Chase was going to go through with letting that little princess die on New Years. He would do what she thought was right, she just had to find a way to convince him.

1:51 am January 1st 2006

Three hours later, Chase stumbled into the Diagnostics lounge, looking for some tea. He was tired, sore, and in a rotten mood. However, that was par for the course when he had to deal with Dr. Ayersman. The man was an idiot and a prig. He had never liked working with Chase, even before the whole blackmail thing because he thought Chase was too uppity for a 'mere intensivist.' To which Chase pointed out that a large portion of his residency had involved working under one of the best transplant surgeons in the world, Dr. Bernard, as the intensivist on his team. Dr. Bernard had been pompous, self righteous, infallible, condescending, inappropriate, and had a god complex the size of Sydney Harbour but Chase had learned many things from him; chief of which was how to take a joke.

It had been very rewarding work, knowing that you were saving lives, but there was also the really shitty part of the job that Chase's Catholic upbringing couldn't let him forget. In order to do a transplant there must be a donor and usually, that donor is going to die. It was never easy for him to sit there and basically watch a person die right in front of him and do nothing. The first few times he had done it, he had walked out at the end of surgery and vomited until he dry heaved. Then he had gone home and cried his eyes out into his pillow. It wasn't that he hadn't known that these people were already dead or close to it before he even got there, it was just the mere act of turning of the machines and watching a person breathe their last as their heartbeat slowed and then became nonexistent was hard. He had tried to rationalize to himself, that what made them who they were was already gone ect, but watching the cessation of the autonomic acts of life never really got any easier than it had been when he had watched it happen to his mother.

He had been surprised the first time he had seen it, when he had watched his mother die. It hadn't been like it was in the movies. There was no dramatic final breath, head lolling to one side, and eyes staring fixedly up in a loving manner at her only son so that he could dramatically close them as he said his farewell. It had been much slower actually and harder to tell. She hadn't stopped breathing the moment they shut off the machines like he had thought she would. Instead she had continued to breathe for several hours. At first it had seemed normal and he had sat there holding her hand and praying for her. Then she had started to choke but not gasp as saliva ran down a throat with no ability left to swallow. Soon her breathing had become more shallow with a distinct clicking in the back of her throat as her tongue slid into the back of her throat. Finally her breathing became almost nonexistent and he had crawled in bed with her, gathering her to his chest and cradling her head on his shoulder. Each time he thought she was gone; she would take another small, thin breath, her muscles too weak to fight against the weight of her ribcage. Finally, there was just a gentle deflation of her lungs and a sinking of her chest. There was no dramatic last breath, nothing at all, just and almost imperceptible sigh.

Maybe the lack of drama had been why it was so hard for him to finally realize when she was truly gone. He had waited for and dreaded the moment of her death for so long. Even before she had gone into hospital he had lived in a constant state of dread that he would come home and find her dead. Sometimes that dread had been so bad that he was afraid to go into his own home and would sit across the street for hours waiting for some sign that she hadn't drowned in her own vomit, fallen in the pool, or drunken herself to death. But with that tiny sigh he realized it was over. It had been one of the worst, yet one of the most liberating moments of his life. There was such a sense of freedom in knowing that the worst had happened and no matter what else may come, it could never hurt you as badly. Now, as he watched his patients expel that last bit of air in a final sigh, he wondered if the patient's family will find it awful, freeing, or both.

In some ways, he wanted to thank his father for sparing him that terrible, dreading death watch that he had gone through with his mother. Rowan had known how hard it had been for Robert to sit there, day after day, watching his mother wither and fail in front of him. And how that feeling of relief when it was finally over and done with had, with time, twisted him up inside with guilt because it wasn't right for a son to feel relief at the death of his mother. Part of Chase recognized that his father's act of keeping him in the dark had been a backwards act of love. He had wanted to spare his son that guilt. But their was a larger part of him, that wanted to dig up his father and find some way to hurt him for denying him the change to be there. Rowan had had no right to turn his only son away to live in a false sense of security and a never give him chance to prepare or say good bye. Rowan had had no right to deny his son the change to be there and hear that sigh and know that is was truly over.

Though it used to tear him up inside, now he was more philosophical about transplant surgeries. It still bothered him but he found ways to ignore it or deflect it so he didn't end up hanging over the toilet every time he had to shut off life support. But it was still hard, to sit down with a family and tell them that, though their loved one was still breathing and just looked like they were sleeping, they were actually dead. It was such a helpless feeling, to only take on a patient when all hope was gone. That was part of the reason he had come to work for House. When his residency was complete, Dr. Bernard had offered him a permanent position on his team with a huge salary and all the perks and privileges. Chase had declined; instead he had accepted a position at Monash with his father. That had lasted three weeks before Chase was about ready to slit his own throat and had sent his CV out to every available fellowship in the English, Dutch, or German speaking world. House had been the first to offer him a job and he had snapped it up.

At first, he couldn't have cared less about where he was. Even still, he wasn't particularly enamored with New Jersey but there was something about House's approach avoidance behaviour and derisive comments where lack of insults felt like fondness that reminded Chase way too much of what he considered parental affection. Slowly House had morphed into a bizarre father replacement for Chase. He was a strange amalgamation of Chase's distant and demanding father that made him bow, scrape, and work past the point of endurance for a mere crumb of attention so that even if it was an insult Chase would say, 'thank you, sir, may I have another?' And a depressed and addicted mother, who plied her misery with drugs and alcohol and found it easier to yell, scream and show her son the back of her hand than to hug, kiss and say she loved him. But he wasn't like the "uncles" from when he had been younger. "Uncle so and so" had always been a code word in his post divorce life for "hey, I'm the bloke plowing your mum so don't be surprised if you walk into the kitchen and see me doing her from behind on the kitchen table." He was just this unattainable figure that seemed to loom over Chase, like God maybe, at least sometimes. Then he would grow up and remember that House was just his boss not his father.

But other times he would fall back into the same stupid patterns he had been living his entire life. And it would crush him to realize that House didn't really care about him and thought he was a moron. But there was always that sneaking feeling that maybe House did care. He remembered, sitting in this exact spot, months ago, when Kayla had been recovering from surgery. It had been the middle of the night and Cameron and Foreman had gone home. She was still in the ICU so Chase had stayed. Plus, he hadn't wanted to go home because if he did he knew he would have to think about things he didn't want to. He had been sitting at the table, his uneaten dinner spread before him, feeling numb and nauseous. In the span of the last 12 hours, he had been chewed out by House, Wilson, Cuddy, Cameron, and Foreman and found out his father had died from an illness he should have known about.

After some time, he had pushed his food away, giving up all pretense of eating because the idea made him want to vomit. He had rested his head on his folded arms and tried to swallow past the dull, hollow ache that had taken up residency in his chest. That was how House had found him. He realized now, that that must have been when House had figured out about Rowan, because the elder doctor hadn't made a snide quip or scathing remark. He had just sat down beside Chase and asked if he was ok. Chase had looked over at him and House's face had seemed full of genuine concern, which had scared the crap out of Chase. All the yelling and derision hadn't phased him but House's kindness had undone him and he had jumped up and run away to hide. He had found an empty room and hidden in the washroom of it and cried. It was the only time had cried over his father's death.

What he hadn't known, was that House had found him. The elder doctor had stood outside of the door, hesitantly listening to his duckling cry. He had been torn between his desire to comfort the lonely, grieving young man and his desire to keep a safe distance between himself and the rest of the world. But he had waited, in case Chase had needed him. He had almost opened the door at one point, when he heard his fellow start to vomit but he didn't. He allowed fear and indecision to prevent him from making a real human connection. He had thought through every conceivable way that the situation could play out if he opened the door and if he didn't but none had been close to what had really happened. But in the end he realized that the mess Chase's parents had made of him wasn't his responsibility but the mess it had made of his case was. He had left Chase to his guilt and his miserable, hidden grief. So House had limped away and an hour later when he had seen Chase again, he had pretended as if he knew nothing.

But Chase didn't like thinking about that. It made him royally depressed and right now he didn't need to be any more depressed than he already was. Instead, he picked at the limp tuna sandwich in front of him, trying to work up the energy to eat. He was torn between the desire for food and sleep but before he could decide, he was interrupted by Foreman. He wasn't in the mood to deal with the other doctor but at least it was better than Cameron.

"Chase." The eldest duckling hailed, "I wanted to talk to you."

"Those have got to be five of the most loathsome words in the English language." Chase groused, pulling the crust off of his bread to nibble on.

"Someone is grumpy." Foreman tried to joke. He was not happy at all. The situation around the hospital was stressful at best and the situation between Chase and Cameron was even worse. Logically he agreed with Chase. There was no reason to keep Diana on life support when that bed and those resources could be spent on someone else. But emotionally he agreed with Cameron. Her parents should not be forced to remember the holiday as the day their daughter died. And it was so little work to give them that one mercy. The worst part was he realized that his two fellow doctors had dug their heels in because of things that had happened to them in the past. Because Cameron had lost her husband too soon, she always thought it was better to hang on and because Chase had watched his mother linger and die slowly, he always thought it was better to let go. Medically, Foreman usually sided with Chase, for all his laziness, he was a brilliant doctor but friendship wise, he sided with Cameron, which was why he was here talking to Chase in the first place.

"What do you want, Foreman? You aren't going to kiss me then try to get me squiffy to take advantage of me like House did last year are you?" Chase asked, with a sideways look, wrapping his food back up and resting his head on the table. He was referring to the previous New Year's Eve when House, Wilson, Cuddy, Foreman, Cameron, and himself had all been sitting in the conference room when the years had changed. Cameron had made a comment about everyone needed a New Years kiss. Cuddy at looked resigned, Cameron hopeful, and House devious. Chase had been ignoring them thinking about Cass, when House had grabbed him by the hair and kissed him full on the lips with tongue. Chase had been way too stunned to actually do anything at the time. Then House had pulled out much Champagne and other assorted liquors and tried to get him drunk so he would put on a French maid's uniform. Even though it had all been a joke, it had all been really humiliating.

"Don't worry, you aren't my type. You don't have enough meat on dem bones." He dropped into an exaggerated southern accent and smiled before he grew serious again. "I want you to reconsider Cameron's request. It doesn't cost us much and it will mean a great deal to them and her if you just give them till Monday." Foreman started in. He had intended to try more jokes, but they were both too tired for them.

"No. They deserve to know the truth about their daughter's condition. There is no reason to drag this out, letting them think there is still hope, only to blind side them with, 'oh by the way your daughter is brain dead and we've known since Saturday night but we just didn't want to mess up the party atmosphere'."

"It doesn't have to be that way. We can come up with some reason, some excuse." He tried to reason.

"There is no excuse for keeping them in dark about their daughter's eminent death." Chase snapped, getting up and turning to look out of the window.

Foreman leaned back and smiled. "I feel like I walked into the Twilight Zone. Cameron is being sneaky, mean, and underhanded. You are being emotional and have a backbone, and I'm having to be the peace maker. This shit just ain't right!" That got Chase to turn around and look at him. "Look man, I agree with you but Cameron can't handle the idea of these people loosing their daughter on a holiday. If you go through with this you will prove that you were right but she won't sleep for weeks. Do you really want to do that to her?" Foreman was all seriousness now.

Chase wanted to ask Foreman if he cared what it would do to the Aussie to have to lie to these people. If he thought for one minute that there might be a reason Chase was so insistent to keep the family informed so they wouldn't feel like they were hit by a truck while going to the market. But he didn't because Foreman didn't know about Rowan and Chase had no desire for him to find out. "So we now pattern our procedures around Cameron's nocturnal habits?" He snipped.

"No, but it really means a lot to her and you owe her after what went down between you two." Foreman hated to pull that card. He had tried to find out from Chase what had happened between the two but in typical tight-lipped style, Chase had said nothing. He had neither confirmed nor denied that they had had sex. Cameron had been more forthcoming about it and had told him in far too great of detail what had gone down between them. That poor woman needed more female friends. So, even though he knew that if anyone had actually been taken advantage of that night, it was probably Chase, he also knew that his blonde co worker suffered from debilitating Catholic guilt over everything even remotely improper that he had ever done. So why shouldn't Foreman utilize the fact that Chase was probably being slowly eaten alive by the guilt that he had slept with someone under the influence of drugs after he had spent so much time watching other people do the same thing do his mother.

"I don't owe her anything." He said more quietly, the familiar twang of guilt resonating through him. "It isn't right or fair that the rest of us should kowtow to her because she can't deal with death. Nor is it right to give the Mansfield's a false sense of security just to assuage Cameron's guilt."

"But Chase." Foreman started but was cutoff by the Aussie.

"When the organ donor people are ready, I'm telling the family." He then turned and stalked into House's office, effectively ending the conversation.

Foreman sighed at left, not wanted to deal with either them for a while. Maybe there was something Cuddy needed him to do.

In the ICU, Cameron had taken it upon her self to talk to the Mansfields. She stood over them, as they sat beside their daughter. It made her feel better to stand, stronger some how. As if the position and the white coat made her infallible. "We are optimistic that there will be some change." She smiled.

"But the other doctor said that it didn't look good." Mrs. Mansfield asked.

"Brain injuries are tricky. Some people come out of them with no adverse affects at all but others don't. We just have to wait and see." Her smile grew more fragile.

"So there is a chance she will get better?" This time it was the father.

"There is a chance." She answered because it wasn't a lie, there was an extremely small chance.

"So what are you going to do for her?"

"Right now all we can do is wait. You should sit with her and talk to her. That can really help bring someone around. We will re evaluate in a few hours." She turned to leave, sparing one last look at the little girl and her loving parents.

"I don't understand. Dr. Chase made it sound like things were grim, now you say that she will get better?" Her father questioned. Chase had spoken to them briefly when he had intubated her and moved her to the ICU. He had explained that she had a brain injury but that was all he had had time for before he was called into surgery. Mr. Mansfield didn't like the way this lady doctor wouldn't look him in the eyes and talked so fast that he felt like he was interrupting her if he wanted to say something. He had felt more comfortable with the Australian doctor.

"Dr. Chase is in surgery right now, so he hasn't been kept up to date on her condition. I'm telling you that you should just relax and wait for a while and we'll check again soon." She turned and walked out quickly. She felt terrible lying to them, but realized it was all for the best. And after all, wasn't that what House had taught them, do anything, say anything to help people. Chase couldn't argue with that.

She walked down the hall and headed for their office. She just couldn't understand why Chase was so insistent to cause this family pain. Didn't he understand that when someone was sick or hurt, family holidays were precious? She sometimes thought that Chase had no feelings at all. When her husband, had been sick, all she could think about was finding some way to keep him around. She remembered how their last Christmas together had been more special than any other because the doctors said he wouldn't make it that long. Their New Year's kiss had been the most meaningful of her life.

But he hadn't lived to Valentine 's Day. He had died two days before and she remembered the stark realization that he would be around for that holiday. And now she hated it with a passion. All she could think of, when she saw the candies and puffy hearts was the pain of loosing her husband. She didn't want to damn someone else to that fate. She didn't want the Mansfield's to have to dread New Years every year because it was the anniversary of their daughter's death. And it was so easy for them to prevent that. All they had to do was keep her on life support for a few more hours and it would make such a huge difference to the family. She would make Chase understand one way or another.

She found Foreman in the lab, looking over several result, handed to him by a haggard looking tech. "I talked to Chase." He said.

"And?"

"He won't budge." Foreman shrugged.

Cameron shoved a loose strand of hair behind her ear in irritation. "I can't believe that for once in that pussy's miserable, passive aggressive life he manages to say 'no' to something, and it has to be this."

"Ironic isn't it." He was quite amused that Cameron had called Chase a pussy. "Cam, maybe he is right. We should just let the kid go. It is his call, she's his patient."

"No, he isn't right. He is just being lazy and isn't willing to fight. It's wrong of us to destroy the last memories they will have of their daughter because Chase doesn't want another patient to work on. It is about damn time that he learns that being a doctor requires heart, caring, and sensitivity, goddamn it. Three things that he usually lacks." She stalked towards the diagnostics office, Foreman following.

"How exactly are you going to teach him?"

"Every woman is born with two weapons in her arsenal. Used well, they can take down the strongest men. Weapon number one failed but I goddamn guarantee Chase will go down to weapon number two." She bit out, spoiling for a fight.

They arrived in the office to find Chase fast asleep in House's chair. Cameron set about making coffee to kill time till he woke up.

Back in House's office, Chase leaned back in their master's big chair, pulling his lab coat over himself like a blanket. He was planning to take a nap before he had to go back into surgery. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, quickly drifting off to sleep. He dreamed of home, like he often did, the sound and sight of the ocean bringing him a sense of peace and safety. But his dreams were not calm ones.

_He looked up from where he was building a sandcastle. He loved to play in the sand, even now. American's had their fond memories of snowballs and snowmen; he had them of building castles in the sand with his father. The Christmas he had been five, he had spent most of his time outside playing on the beach. Every day he would build a new castle for his father and wait beside it for the elder man to come. As the tide rolled back in, he would stand in front of it, his reedy legs doing nothing to protect his masterwork from being taken back out to sea. Everyday he would wait and every day his father would come too late to see it. Everyday his father would promise to see the one the next day and every next day he wouldn't be there._

_He walked along the familiar beach. He knew if he looked to his left the house he grew up in would be sitting up on the embankment with its steep staircase to the back door. He looked ahead of himself and saw his father standing some distance away, looking out to sea. He headed towards the elder man, wanted to hug him and tell him that he had had a horrible dream that Rowan had died of cancer. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to catch up to Rowan, his father was always just too far away. _

_He tried to yell, to scream at his father to make him stop, but no sound came out. Every time he opened his mouth to yell, sand blew into it choking him and obscuring his sight. He couldn't even speak because of the choking weight of the sand. Tears streamed from his eyes as he tried desperately to make some sound to let Rowan know that he was behind him. In the end Rowan never turned around and Robert never managed to make a sound._

He woke with a start, coughing. He stretched his jaw out to try and offset the headache that would surely ensue from grinding his teeth in his sleep. The dream was quickly fading from his memory but he recognized a common theme in it. He, like many present and former asthmatics often had dreams about choking to death or not being able to breath as a form of anxiety dream. He hated those dreams. He steadfastly refused to acknowledge the symbolism of not being able to speak though. He could only handle so much self realization in one day.

He looked out to see Foreman and Cameron in the conference room, sharing some coffee. He wondered if he could play off like he was still asleep, but Cameron made eye contact with him. No such luck. With no way out, he stood up, shrugged back on his coat, and walked in to the room. Foreman gave him a sympathetic look and handed him some coffee. He accepted it but would have much preferred tea.

"You get some rest?" The black man asked.

"Yeah, a little." He answered, still trying to avoid Cameron's roving eyes.

"Chase," Cameron started, "you have to wait."

"No I don't." He snapped, having been dreading this conversation for hours.

"Yes you do. There is no reason to destroy their happy memories. There is no reason to hurt them even more than Diana's death already will." She stood up and walked towards, where he stood by the window.

"Do you really think one day is going to make that much of a difference? She is already dead, letting them think otherwise is cruel." He turned to glare at her. But he knew one day could make all the difference. If only he had had one more day with his father, one day to talk to him and tell him that he was loved and hated, respected and feared, to tell him that he would be missed and grieved.

"No, Chase, not letting them think otherwise is cruel. Don't you have any feelings? Don't you understand that they love her and you are taking that away from them?"

"No, I'm not. A brain aneurism took her away from them. I'm just giving them the news."

"You may be able to sleep at night thinking that, but I can't."

"You can not really be selfish enough to think that you are the only doctor that hates giving bad news?"

"And you can't really be lazy enough to want to get rid of her so you don't actually have to work, like that woman Foreman and I saw you overdose with morphine." Foreman almost winced in sympathy. Cameron could be evil when she wanted to be.

"If you think I did that because I'm lazy, than nothing I say to you is going to matter." He said quietly and turned away to stare of the window.

Cameron turned to Foreman and gave him a subtle wink. "Chase," she touched his arm, forcing him to face her, "It was Valentine's Day when my husband died. It's supposed to be a day for lover, but instead it is the day that I hide in bed and cry because I miss him." She paused and looked down, allowing tears to flood her eyes. When she looked up again, one lone tear had slipped from her left eye. "I don't want the Mansfields to remember the holidays as the day Diana died. I want them to have good memories like I don't have." He voice broke.

Chase looked away from her again, but this time not in anger. She knew she had won. Chase stared and glared when he was pissed, he looked away when he was defeated.

"Cameron, I don't want to drag this out. It hurts worse to not." Then he stopped. The words freezing in his mouth, unable to get past the icy lump that formed in his throat whenever he thought about his father.

"Trust me, Chase, I know pain and I know grief. But mostly I know that this is the right thing to do." She let another tear fall.

'I know too. And I know how it feels to be kept out in the dark while someone you love is dying because other people have decided that you don't have a right to know.' Was what he wanted to say, but instead he said. "You win, Cameron. I'll wait till Monday." He turned and walked out, not being able to face either of them now.

"I know you hate sports metaphors, dear, but that is what you call a home freakin' run." Foreman looked at her in awe.

"I told you. He may have been able to turn down sex but I knew he wouldn't be able to stand strong against tears." She smiled and wiped her eyes.

"And they call House manipulative?" Foreman joked as he headed out to find Chase and make sure that he wasn't about to throw himself off the top of the hospital.

TBC


	3. Reeds

A/N: Wow, I know I was late updating but I'm having a little more trouble with this story than the others. I just can't seem to get Cameron's voice right so I gave up. Hope you like it.

**STORMS **

3:33 am January 1, 2006

Foreman found his fellow doctor standing on the top of the hospital roof, much like he thought he would. It wasn't the low two story section they had found Dan on, but the 10 story part attached to the medical school. Foreman hated it because he was more than a little afraid of heights; Chase liked to hang out up there, though, because you could see the river in the distance. He never could understand Chase's weird obsession with watching water move, but then again, Chase couldn't understand Foreman's obsession with fancy cars.

"Hey." Foreman greeted him. He stayed well back from the edge, where Chase was standing, even if there was a short wall acting as a ledge. It said a lot about them. Foreman much preferred to play it safe and stay away from danger. Chase had no problem pushing the envelope and standing right on the edge at least with his physical safety. Foreman figured he had way too much to loose to take too many risks. He really hoped Chase didn't have the opposite opinion that he had nothing to lose, or maybe heights were just the one thing Chase wasn't afraid of.

"Hey yourself. Is Cameron alright?"

"Sure. She'll be fine. She's just PMSing or something." He pulled his lab coat tighter around himself. The storm was still raging around them and ice and snow were blowing under his collar. He was really surprised that the heat loving Aussie was willing standing out in the cold.

"No she isn't. That was two weeks ago."

"How would you know?"

"Because not long ago I had a vested interest in keeping tabs on such things." Foreman was more than surprised, it was the closest thing to an admission that he had slept with Cameron that Foreman had heard yet. "She was trying to get her own way at any cost." He was about to protest but Chase stopped him. "Please, I'm not an idiot. First logic, then sex, then nagging, and finally tears; she was doing it to get me to give in."

"If you knew, then why did you?" Foreman was slightly stunned. He had to admit he admired Chase's almost freakish ability to read people. House had claimed he had hired Foreman because Foreman had street smarts and could tell when he was being hustled. He had left out the fact that Chase was almost inhuman in his ability to determine what people were thinking and feeling and knew way more about drugs than either himself or Cameron. He guessed that had a lot to do with the way Chase had been brought up. It was a very common trait among adult survivours of alcoholism and abuse; it just usually wasn't so blatant in men. But Foreman could easily one up him by at least knowing how to dress like a grown up.

"Because I was screwed no matter what I did. If I didn't agree with her she would keep hounding me until I did. It was just easier to give in now. Plus, if I didn't, she would forever think of me as heartless. But if I did give in, I'm the only one who gets angry at me. Luckily I've gotten used to ignoring it, when I give myself the cold shoulder." He stated wryly, then added embarrassed. "And I can't stand it, when people cry. I fold like house of cards."

"I see, I'll have to remember that. Speaking of your cold shoulder, are you planning to take this out on Cameron later?" Foreman was more concerned about this than anything. He had once been on the receiving end of Chase's passive aggressive torture techniques and it was more frustrating than dealing with House. House would usually rise to fight back so that you could eventually work your problems out. Chase would ignore you or snub you. He made you alternately feel like you wanted to strangle him or fall down on your knees and beg for forgiveness. He didn't want Cameron to have to go through that because he had no doubt that Chase would make her crack completely.

"Probably, why?"

"Because she doesn't deserve it. She is just doing what she thinks is right." Foreman tried to defend her.

"No, she is emotionally blackmailing everyone else into doing what she thinks is right, even though she is wrong."

"Is that any different than what House does every minute of every day?"

"No, but do House and I seem like good friends to you?"

"Good point."

"House does it for the good of the patient, to find a way to treat them or because he is bored. Cameron is doing it to make herself feel better at the expense of everyone else."

"At the expense of who? This one little, white lie won't hurt anyone and will make a big difference to them. Accept it and move on. Don't blame Cameron because Daddy Chase didn't dress up as Santa and come down the chimney for you, when you were a little boy, and so now you have no concept of how it feels to be sentimental about the holidays."

"Why does everyone assume that everything about me has something to do with my father?" Chase snapped.

"I was joking. What the hell is wrong with you today?" Foreman asked. It wasn't like Chase to not be able to take a joke. With anyone else, he might have just assumed it was from the stress around the hospital but he had learned that the more crazy and hectic things were, the calmer Chase usually was. He only ever seemed to freak out after everything was said and done. He watched his colleague take a deep breath and pull his shoulders back from their previous slump.

"Nothing's wrong. I have to go talk to the family." He was like an actor preparing for a role, which was one of Foreman's biggest problems with him, his perceived dishonesty. Foreman was a straight shooter and liked everything to be on a level playing field. He couldn't stand the way Chase seemed to never be completely honest about anything, from his medical history, to his family history, even to his general personality. Chase hid behind masks, misconceptions, and stereotypes so that no one ever knew him well enough to get close to him. It just frustrated the hell out of Foreman because he hated subtexts. It was also one of the many reasons House tended to get on his nerves.

"If you really disagreed that much with Cameron, then why didn't you fight more? Why don't you learn to get a damn backbone and stand up for what you believe in?" Foreman asked him. He had to admit he had been a little proud of his coworker. It wasn't often Chase tried to make people side with him. The only time he could remember Chase doing it was when Rowan had been there and it was clear as day that had had little to do with the medical diagnosis and more to do with Chase trying to hide his mild nervous breakdown.

"I told you, there was no point."

"If you were willing to argue about it for as long as you did, then there was a point. You have got to be the weakest coward I have ever met, about as tough as a wet piece of spaghetti." The derision in his voice evident.

"I've never been to California, but have you ever sat there during the monsoon and watched a cyclone role in?"

"Most people run for cover during tornados, Chase." Foreman sighed, Chase's weird non sequitur responses were another reason he got mad at his coworker.

"Not tornados, typhoons." He corrected, not realizing that Americans used cyclone to describe something else.

"Hurricanes, no. They aren't real common in LA. Why?" Foreman crossed his arms over his chest and tucked his hands under them. He was cold and wanted to go back inside. He hated to admit that he didn't have that much better of a cold tolerance than Chase did. Lightening arced through the sky, painting after images on his eyes.

"They're insane. It rains so hard you can't breathe and it feels like your drowning. The wind is so strong that you feel like if you stood on top of a building and lifted your arms you could fly away." Foreman took an involuntary step back, not comfortable with the idea of flying off of any roof even though he knew the wind was not strong enough to move him. "When I was kid, we lived right up on the beach outside of Melbourne." Foreman's eyes widened with shock. Chase never spontaneously shared things about himself with people. He just didn't do it. It would be like House giving someone a comforting hug. "The storms there were nothing like they were in Sydney or Brisbane because Melbourne is pretty well protected but we still got the tail end of storms every year. Our next door neighbour had a boathouse on a little dock down along the surf, right in the middle of a patch of reeds. Every year during the monsoon, a storm would roll in flood and or blow down the stupid thing. One year I remember they had spent a bunch of money getting an engineer to come and build it with concrete piers and everything. That year I remember sitting up in my room and watching out of the window as a storm tore it to little pieces and strewed it all over the beach. That year the wind was blowing so hard the reeds were bent almost over to the ground. They tried teak beams and steel girders but every year the damn thing blew down."

"So they should have built it out of bricks and moved on, what the hell is the point of this." Foreman snapped. The wind circled about them both, blowing Chase's hair and coat around him, making him look like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a mad scientist.

"No matter how strong the house was or how they tried to re enforce it, something could always pull it down. But when the rains were over and the water receded, the reeds would still be there, a little battered and a little bent but still there."

"And the moral of that story is that you should always trust nature over manmade?" Foreman asked.

"No, but there's more than one type of strength and things that don't know how to bend will eventually break."

Foreman took a deep breath. "And you are a master at bending over backwards." He hated it when Chase got into philosophical moods because he was usually right. He blamed it on growing up too close to Japan and China. He knew he needed to take things back to a more comfortable ground for both of them. He wasn't happy with self analysis and Chase wasn't happy with sharing personal things. Jokes were the common ground between them so he went there. "That was beautiful, maybe you should put it on a fortune cookie along with your tonsil story. But it is way too late to be that philosophical and we have a patient's family to lie to."

"Then I guess I should go lie to them." He said dejectedly.

"I'll go with you. We'll keep this short and sweet." Foreman counseled. Chase nodded and they headed back in.

4:07 am January 1st 2006

"Hello," Chase followed Foreman into the Mansfield's room, feeling butterflies swirl around his stomach. He took a deep breath and tried to remind himself that he had lied to patients repeatedly. But he knew this was different. Before he lied to save lives, now he lied to save one of his coworker's feelings. Funny how Foreman was doing everything he could think of to save Cameron from herself but didn't miss an opportunity to rub his nose in Kayla's death.

"Dr. Chase, Dr. Foreman." Mr. Mansfield rose to greet him, extending a large callused hand. Chase accepted it, looking down at Diana and noticing that her hands were starting the curl back towards her forearms. It was a sure sign of sever neural impairment.

"How is she doing?" Chase asked just to cover up the noise of the ventilator and the beeping of the stat monitor. Normally those sounds soothed him but now the rankled.

"You tell us. You're the doctors." Mrs. Mansfield snapped.

Chase sighed. It was a stupid question and he deserved to get yelled at. "We have the results of her latest MRI." He chose to remain standing; he didn't want them to ask him questions. "It doesn't look encouraging."

"But the other doctor said there was a chance she could get better." The wife again. All Chase could think about when he looked at her, was that you could drive a truck through the gap in her front teeth.

"There is a chance, but a very small one. You basically have a choice." Foreman began and every fibre of Chase's being wanted to tell Foreman to shut up and let him tell them the truth but he didn't. "Diana has had a severe brain injury. There is a better than average chance that she will never wake up and if she does she will not be the same girl you remember." The two clutched each other. Foreman waited for them to refocus on him. "There is really only one thing we can try that might help, and keep in mind it is a long shot, and that is putting her into a chemical coma in hopes that the damage will heal itself."

"Can't anyone operate?" The father asked, not really understanding the nature of the injury.

"I'm afraid not. Even if the surgeons weren't stretched to the breaking point right now with all the injured from the accidents, surgery still wouldn't help."

"Why not?" Mrs. Mansfield questioned.

"It's complicated, just trust us. There is nothing they can do. Putting her in a coma is her only hope, but we need your signatures."

"A coma, I don't understand." Mr. Mansfield interrupted Foreman.

Chase pulled out the film of the most recent MRI he had ordered. He had done it just so the parent had thought they were doing something. He pointed to a bright splotch surrounded by darker shades. "That is a piece of Diana's skull, lodged in the base of her brain. All of this around it is fluid rushing to the area, making it swell. Surgeons couldn't risk operating until the swelling went down. That is why we are proposing placing her under heavy sedation."

"But a coma, what will that do?" The father asked, as he clutched his wife's hand. Foreman was vaguely amused that they were so blatant in their favouritism towards Chase. Unlike Cameron, he wasn't insulted by it. It was no different than the unfaithful wife, who had trusted Cameron or Clarence the death row inmate who had opened up to Foreman. It was all about comfort zones and Chase spoke their language like they were used to and understood their analogies. It was fine with him really, let Chase simper and smirk to charm people, he would rather do the thinking anyway.

Chase switched off the light board and took down the films. "The piece of bone and the accompanied swelling is pressing into her brainstem, the part that controls autonomic functions, her ability to breath, her ability to regulate blood pressure, her heartbeat. The swelling is telling her heart to beat too fast and her lungs to work too slow and her blood pressure to go too high. The faster her heart beats and the higher her blood pressure, the more blood ends up pooling in the site of the injury. By placing her in an extremely depressed state, in the ICU we call it heavy sedation not a chemical coma," he shot a look at Foreman. Chemical coma was an outdated name for the procedure that usually scared the hell out of people. "We anesthetize her like we would if she were going in for surgery. It's different from a true coma because we can wake her up and put her back to sleep fairly easily by adjusting the dosages. Once she is asleep, we will take over control of most of her functions for her so we can regulate them. Basically it is like putting her in hibernation, and by doing that we hope to prevent more fluid from collecting around the injury and allow some to drain away. If that happens then there might be a chance that a surgeon can remove the bone and not risk a further bleed."

"But how will waiting help?"

Foreman shifted from one foot to the other. He hated when families questioned them this much. It wasn't like they were ever going to really understand what was happening. But Chase tried to explain anyway. "Leave it to an Aussie to bring beer into it, but the best way I can think to explain it is like opening a shaken beer. If you open it immediately, the beer explodes and goes everywhere but if you wait until everything has settled down then you can open it and not get coated in liquor. The blood in your daughter's brain is sort of like the beer. If we remove the bone now, we risk her bleeding to death even if the surgeons could get to the bone without destroying too much brain tissue. But if we wait, then the swelling might reduce enough to actually get to the bone fragment and remove it without killing her. Waiting is really the only chance."

"Are there risks?" Not surprisingly, the mother was regaining her composure first. Chase had learned after years of telling families bad news, that mothers usually reacted the worst at first but usually pulled themselves back together and functioning much faster than fathers.

Foreman and Chase looked at each other and Foreman gestured for him to explain. They both knew that there was virtually no risk because they couldn't really make things any worse but they had to maintain appearances. "Prolonged sedation can lead to depressed brain function or fungal lung infections but that isn't really an issue here because we'll know within 24 hours or so if it is working. There is also a risk that she will throw a clot."

"How?" The mother again.

"Like I said, we are going to depress her systems so her blood won't be moving as fast or with as much force as it normally does. There is a risk that platelets could collect and form clots cutting off blood to any of her organs. Normally we can prevent this by using a cocktail of blood thinners but they are contraindicated in this case because of the bleeding in her brain. So we will monitor her for any change in her functions to determine if there is a clot."

"What if we don't do anything?" The father tried.

"Then she'll die." Foreman stepped in. This was taking way too long. He was beginning to side with Chase and think this was a really cruel trick to play on these people and he didn't like agreeing with Chase over anything. "This is her only chance."

They looked over at Chase and he shook his head to show he agreed with Foreman. "Then let's do it." The mother answered for them both.

"I'll be back with the drugs in a few minutes." Chase answered and left, Foreman trailing behind him.

Foreman stopped him once they were out of earshot. "What happened to in and out as quick as possible?"

"They deserve to at least be given some explanation." Chase looked down and defended himself. He seemed like a penitent child trying to make excuses for stupid behaviour.

"Are you sure you and Cam didn't switch bodies or something or is this all some elaborate prank?" Foreman joked then headed off to check on his other patients.

5:21 am January 1st 2006

Cameron was waiting for Chase outside of the Diana's room after he administered the barbiturates to her. She had been watching him to make sure he didn't slip up, not that she thought he would but he wasn't a very good liar. At least, she didn't think he was a very good liar, which was why she couldn't understand how patient's kept falling for his stupid tonsil story. Maybe he had just practiced that one enough times that it sounded realistic.

She watched him stand and fiddle with a few things, injecting three medications into one of her two IVs, then bow his head and walk out. As soon as he saw her, he turned and headed the other way. She easily caught up with him even in the congested hallway.

"What did you tell them?" She asked, alarmed at how teary eyed the mother had looked.

"Foreman and I told them that she was critical but we were going to try inducing a coma in hopes of lowering her blood pressure enough to heal the damage in her brain." He told her then hit the button for the lift. He looked down at the file of some dead guy he was still carrying around because he had twice forgotten to drop it off at the nurses' station.

"What did you give her and why were you doing it?"

"Benzo, Heparin, and Regitine. And no anaesthetist in there right mind would bother with her."

"But those won't help her at all and its anesthesiologist." Benzo was short for Benzodiazepine, a class of drug that included Valium and was often used to keep intubated patients calm. Chase was very liberal with its use when he had patients who were forced into long term orotracheal intubation with inflatable cuffs. Without it, the patient was stuck awake with a painfully ridged tube in there throats, making them cough and gag. Heparin was a blood thinner and Regitine a vascular dilator.

"Whatever." He snapped, tired and tired of being corrected. "And no, they won't help her, but nothing will at this point. They will hopefully keep her organs viable enough for transplant if the family so chooses." He pointed out, still annoyed beyond reason at Cameron.

"I guess that's good then." She smiled at him. It was a good cover story, even something that was often done for stroke patients.

"Great." He deadpanned and gave up waiting for the lift and headed towards the stairs, she followed content to continue beating a dead horse.

"We are doing the right thing."

"Just because you keep saying that doesn't make it true, you know." He tried to slam the door before she could follow him, but she was faster and he didn't want to risk hurting her with the heavy door. He considered going into the men's room but she would probably just follow him there too.

"It is right. They will be happier in the long run when they have this final holiday to remember their daughter by."

"I'm sure they will have a hard time forgetting it since they are going to be paying for it for years to come."

"It will be hard but, believe me, if they knew what you were doing they would thank you."

"No they wouldn't. No one ever thanks me." She couldn't argue with that. Intensivists were routinely forgotten by patients since they usually weren't conscious enough to remember all the hard work that the intensivist put into them. Cameron still had a laugh thinking about the poisoned teen with the pushy mother. She had said that House and Foreman had saved her son's life even though Chase had run three arrests, multiple seizures, and slept on a gurney between his and the other teen's door for two days. Luckily Chase only seemed to care about getting recognition from House, which he also never got.

"Yes they would." She said softly, trying to make him feel better. She had no idea why he had dug he heels in about this but she was starting to think there was more behind it than Chase's habitual desire to avoid working on anything even remotely unpleasant.

"Do you really think that a school teacher and stay at home mum are going to thank me, when they get the bill for these 'few precious hour' we are granting them?" He finally snapped. This whole thing was proving to be a great deal harder than he thought it would be. He wanted to yell at someone and since the person he was the most angry at was cold in the ground back home in Melbourne, he took it out on the person he was the second most angry with and who also happened to be right in front of him.

"You are putting a price on a human life?" He stood aghast, never thinking that Chase would do such a thing.

"No, but if I were it would be a pretty hefty price. Since a room in the PICU alone costs $5,000 a night; the ventilator costs about $200 an hour; just having me walk in there costs another $3,000 and another $1000ish every time after the first that I go back in there, assuming of course I bill through the ICU like I'm supposed to if I'm working on anything other than a direct diagnosis. Then there are the meds that are probably another $1,000; the nursing staff another $5,000; the tests we unnecessarily ran on her so I could prescribe the meds ran another $20,000; all of which would have been picked up by the Organ donation board had we told them from the beginning rather than waiting. So they will owe roughly $35,000 so you don't have problems sleeping at night."

Any worry or sympathy she had for him evaporated in that moment and she struck out at him. "Leave it to you to reduce a family's piece of mind to a cash value."

"And leave it to you to forget all practical considerations, when trying to attain a state of Nirvana like happiness in the world." He derided her.

"Their insurance will cover it." She tried in vain to convince him. She hadn't even considered the monetary aspect of what they were doing.

"They come from the land of socialized medicine, they don't have insurance." He told her exasperated.

"They have socialized medicine in Australia?" She tried to divert his attention. She seemed to recall Chase mentioning that they had socialized medicine as the reason he was perpetually baffled by filling out billing sheets.

"They're English, you idiot. What the hell is wrong with you people? England and Australia are two different countries on opposite sides of the world. No Aussie in their right mind would wear a British Cricket shirt, nor would they have an accent like theirs."

"I was just trying to joke with you like House does." She said in a small voice. She had actually thought they were Australian but she wasn't about to admit that. She had made the reverse error with Chase, when she had first met him. She hadn't found out where he was from until she had known him for nearly two months.

"Give up, House actually knows the difference. He just does it to annoy me and I pretend I'm annoyed to make him happy." He snapped. "Maybe one day you will learn that there is a big, wide world that has nothing to do with you." He mocked her and left her in the stairwell, seething. She had won, Chase was doing what she wanted but at what price. Had she ruined the fragile truce they had set up?

6:59 am January 1st 2006

Cameron found Foreman in 4th floor ICU looking in on a patient. She pulled the chart down and looked at it, Roger Philips. Chase and Wilson were listed as the attendings. She looked over at Foreman quizzically. Wilson had called Chase in as one of the specialists on Mr. Philips's treatment team when he needed to be transferred to the ICU. She remembered that Chase had balked at the idea of working on him, but Wilson eventually guilted him into it. He had been obsessing about it ever since. That had been almost two months ago.

"Chase wanted a second opinion on this guy's neurological state." He answered the questioning look in Cameron's eyes.

"And?" She didn't have long, she was due back in the lab soon but she wanted to talk to Foreman first.

"Tough to tell with him this heavily sedated. I'll have to come back and check later. The guy has terminal lung cancer and a severe fungal lesions on his brain, seems sort of pointless to even bother. I just came now to shut Chase up." He smiled over at her.

"Yeah, he's in a mood today." She put the chart back and followed Foreman out of the room.

"He's stressed out, everyone is."

"I never thought I would live to see the day that you defended Chase." She teased.

"I'm not defending him per se, just offering an explanation." He tugged her hair playfully like he used to do to his little sister. Cameron was one of the few things that had made the move to this small city and this stressful hospital bearable.

She sighed and lost the smile on her face. "He's pretty pissed at me, isn't he?" She sounded like a lost child.

"He'll get over it." Foreman was sure that Chase would eventually get over it or his fellowship would end, which ever came first.

"You think so?" She really didn't like the idea of Chase being mad at her. With House, it was sort of a uniting factor between them. If House was mad at someone, then the others banded together to make them feel better, unless it was Chase then they pretended nothing had happened because House always seemed to be mad at Chase. But having him mad at her just seemed wrong, Chase never got mad at anyone.

"You know him; he doesn't stay mad at people for long." He clapped her on the back as she turned off to go to the lab, knowing that he was lying through his teeth. If he had learned anything about his blond co worker, it was that he might act like everything is fine but deep down he held grudges.

"I hope, the last time we were fighting about something I quit my job." She pointed out.

"If it comes to that this time, I'll make sure he quits." Foreman joked as he headed out of the room, leaving the heavily drugged man attached to the ventilators to vegetate awhile longer.

9:34 am January 1st, 2006

Chase dodged around a fast moving gurney as he returned to the ER. He had received a page that he needed to head back down there as soon as possible. He had found enough reasons to avoid going back there so now he had no choice but to return to the hustle and bustle of the ER. Several nurses were standing around a gurney, Chase joined them, assuming that was where he was needed.

"Chase, I've been waiting for you." Dr. Hope Gardner said. She was seated on a stool beside the gurney, at its head stood a short, ugly, hairy, hairy man, with no chin, bad teeth, and a receding hairline. Chase recognized him immediately as Dr. Gardner's husband, not the most attractive people in the world.

"What's up?" He asked as he came to stand beside her. She handed him a neatly wrapped egg sandwich with vegemite and sprouts, no mayonnaise, just he way he liked it. It wasn't until then he realized how hungry he was.

"I love you, Hope." He told her breathlessly as he started to drool at the sight of the food.

"Don't profess love for me, my husband brought them." There was enough food for the entire department, all neatly wrapped. Chase had almost forgotten that her husband owned a very successful catering company.

"Then I love you." He looked over at her husband, Mike. "If you weren't already married I'd snap you up for myself." He teased, taking a bite of his sandwich. It was perfect.

"Should I be worried that you are no longer in love with me?" Dr. Gardner asked him.

"I do still love you, but he's a better cook." He smiled. "And because I love you, you should go home." He looked at her critically. She looked tired.

"I'm fine. I can still do light work, screening and such. I'll be out for three months are you trying to get rid of me already?" She deadpanned. She knew she should probably go home but she felt guilty at the idea of leaving, while everyone else was still working.

"No, I'll miss you horribly and probably loose 10 pounds because you won't be here to feed and water me. House always forgets, rarely wants to play ball, and never takes me out for walks." He pouted. "However, I really don't want to have to deliver your twins, when you work yourself into labour. Childbirth grosses me out."

"You do know that is what that warm, moist spot between a woman's legs is actually for, right."

"Right?" He scoffed, flipping his hair and purposely looking clueless, "next you'll tell me breasts are meant as something other than pillows."

"You're hopeless." She joked with him, as he gave her a friendly kiss on the top of the head. He had managed to make everyone there smile, which was what they needed. He had really needed it too.

His relaxing time was soon interrupted by a page as he had to return to the fourth floor. It was his turn to be responsible for the second and fourth floor ICUs so he was trolling around them, looking for anything that needed to be done. He lingered in Mr. Philip's room for longer than necessary. He knew nothing about this man other than he had a son, who was his next of kin and that he was probably never going to wake up. They had been trying to reach his son all night, with little success. Mr. Philips may very well die before his son made it to the hospital.

Wilson had dragged Chase kicking and screaming onto his case two months ago when the patient had developed a bacterial infection and a 105 degree fever. Ever since then, he had had a really hard time dealing with the man's approaching demise. He knew he was projecting, he knew he was being ridiculous, and he knew that nothing would make him stop. They were all basically on a death watch with Mr. Philips now. Chase just wanted to have Wilson, as his oncologist, make the final call even though he knew there was nothing more that could be done. He just could bring himself to admit it was over. Maybe he wasn't really any different than Cameron, he was just much better at hiding it. The thought made him queasy so he left.

He made his rounds quickly and realized that there was very little he could do so he headed back to their office to grab some tea to take to the Mansfields. There, he found Cameron asleep in the chair. Here hair was out and her scrubs were wrinkled. She had her shoes kicked off and her coat was meant to be covering her but it had slipped down around her waist.

He stopped and watched her for a moment. She shivered slightly in the cool, dry hospital air. He tucked the tea bags into his pocket and walked into House's office proper. He opened the bottom drawer of Houses cabinet, quietly and pulled out a thin, blue blanket House had stolen from the maternity ward. He draped the soft fabric over her, without her so much as stirring. He knew it was partially because of his skill and partially because of how tired she was.

He wanted to be mad at her, he wanted to be able to smack her down and punish her for hurting him but he couldn't. All he could do was think about what she had said, maybe he was being unreasonable. She was probably right, she had known a lot of heartache, he thought. But part of him couldn't stop remembering how it had felt to be blindsided by his father's death. How bad it had been to realize that all the time he had thought things were fine, had been a lie. That, yes it would still have hurt but not nearly as badly if he had just had a chance to prepare, if only one person had thought about what he would have wanted rather than making those decisions for him.

That had been what had actually made him tear up in front of House the day before the peer review. It hadn't been that his father was gone, or that he was getting sued, or even that Foreman had said such awful things about him (yeah he knew, lab techs had big mouths). It had been that House had had more respect for Rowan than for him. House had met and talked to Rowan for all of 10 hours in his life but had been working with Robert for over a year and in all that time he still didn't respect him enough to tell him the truth. Rowan had done what Chase had never been able to do, get House to respect his privacy. That was what had made him feel like he had been horse kicked in the chest. That was what had made him go home and run until he could barely breathe and he could blame the salty water dripping from his face on sweat.

Cameron had done something similar to him, when Rowan was there. She had cornered him and made him feel like a monster for not being nicer to his father. He wished now he had listened to her. She had been right, not that Rowan hadn't done anything wrong, but that Chase should have ignored it. He should have swallowed how upset he was and he should have begged his father to stay for a drink. He should never have been rude or snippy to him. He should have never brought up his mother. He should not have let anyone know that he was angry. He should have told his father that he loved him. Maybe the way he had acted had been the reason Rowan hadn't said anything to him? Maybe if he had been nicer and more loving then Rowan would have wanted to have him around at the end?

She had been right then, maybe she was right now. He hadn't been willing to tell Foreman that but deep down that was what he was afraid of. He had just felt totally off kilter ever since Rowan had died. He had been vacillating between feeling even more distant than usual to feeling more needy than he had in years. He had let himself be swayed by a nine year old because all he could think about was that he hadn't been there to give his father a last wish. Then he had slept with Cameron because he wanted someone, anyone to spend time with him just so he didn't have to be alone. Things had gotten worse after he had found out House had known. It had started to erode away his confidence in himself. How had House figured out Rowan had been sick if his own son hadn't seen it? How good of a diagnostician could he be if he had missed terminal cancer in his own father?

All these things were swimming around in his head as he tucked the blanket around Cameron. He had taken a stand on a gut reaction to what they were going to do. But he had done other things based on foolishly trusting himself and they had all blown up in his face. This probably would too, so he had decided to give in and agree. She was probably right anyway.

He straightened up and resisted the urge to lay a soft kiss on her forehead. They were coworkers, nothing else. Instead he headed back out into the hall and to Diana's room. He paused in front of the door, offering a silent prayer that they were doing the right thing. He wasn't sure that he trusted God anymore than he trusted himself or Cameron but unlike everyone else, at least God pretended to listen to what he said. He plastered a fake smile on his face and walked in.

"Good morning, Dr. Chase." The mother greeted, somewhat chipper. "I think she is doing a little better, " she smiled. "Her breathing seems much easier than before."

Chase smiled back and had to stop himself from pointing out that was because her body's natural desire to breathe on its own was completely gone and no longer warring with the ventilator. The woman's optimism made him want to throw up. "That's could be encouraging." He answered noncommittally as he examined the chart. The nurses had kept up with the meds to ready her for donation surgery without even asking questions. God, he loved overworked nurses. He would have to remember to get flowers for their station to thank them for being totally unobservant to the fact that she hadn't actually been added to the donor list yet.

"So, can you tell us anything?" This time it was the father. The man had been dozing in a pullout chair on the other side of the room but now had risen to stand beside them. He saw the hopeful smile on his wife's face and Chase saw that same hope reflected in the father's eyes. He was back to being angry at Cameron.

"It's far too early to tell but I do have something that will at least brighten your morning if not your outlook." He produced his last two Typhoo teabags from his pocket, reluctantly handing them over. "The stuff they stock in the cafeteria downstairs is some sort of orange pekoe nonsense that is completely vile, only and American would drink it."

"Thank you, Dr. Chase, I was wondering where you got a proper cup of tea 'round here." The father joked.

"Don't even try. I learned the hard way that if you go to a restaurant and order tea, they bring you a light brown liquid with ice floating in it. It's just weird." He smiled, charmingly at them. "If you need anything else, just have one of the nurses page me. If I'm in surgery then ask for Drs Cameron or Foreman." He then left quickly, not wanting to look at the hope and trust in there faces anymore. He finished his rounds and retired to eat his breakfast. His anger towards Cameron had been rekindled so he didn't want to go back to their department. He chose instead to go to the chapel. He knew she wouldn't go in there nor would she likely think to look for him there either.

10:48 am January 1st 2006

Cameron woke from her two hour nap with 12 minutes to spare. It was an uncanny ability that many doctors developed, the ability to gauge time, even in sleep. Wilson was the only doctor she knew, who wasn't good at it. But then again, he had an entire staff of people to handle things so he didn't have to. She had expected to wake, cramped and cold like she normally did, when napping in House's chair. But she noticed that she felt warm and comfortable because someone had put a blanket over her. She was still cramped though.

She stood up, trying to stretch the kinks out and decided to go and thank Foreman for the blanket. After a quick chat, she found out that Foreman had been busy for the last three hours and hadn't come near the office. She pondered whether House had returned or maybe Wilson. No one else in the hospital except for Cuddy would have gone into House's office and she doubted Cuddy would have left her sleeping. That left only Chase as the culprit. She headed to find him and thank him.

It turned out it took her nearly 20 minutes to track him down, he was hiding and not in any of his or House's usual spots. The only reason she had even found him was that April had mentioned that she had seen him go into the Chapel. Without thinking on it a moment, she barged her way into the chapel and sat down beside him. He was eating sandwich and drinking tea, his concentration focused on a file he was reading. They were more notes for an upcoming surgery.

"Chase," she slid into the pew beside him, making him jump. She hid a smile at his reaction. Her and her brother had spent many years perfecting their abilities to sneak up on each other but Chase wasn't even a challenge. He had to be one of the most oblivious people she had ever met. Now House, he was a challenge.

"God, Cameron, can't someone get a moments peace from you?" He snapped, embarrassed at his lapse.

"If you are asking God for the answer, then here would be a good place to do it." She joked as she stared hungrily at his breakfast. She hadn't eaten since last night and was starving. Without being asked, he tore off a quarter of his sandwich, removed the top bun and replaced it with another piece of the bottom bun so there would be no vegemite on it, then handed it to Cameron. Just because he was still mad at her didn't mean he would let her go hungry or maybe he was just that much of a doormat. She smiled at him, expecting him to do nothing less. One of the few perks of being the only girl in the department was the ability to steal other people's food with impunity. Though to be fair, House was constantly stealing Chase's food and then criticizing the Aussie's tastes and ability to cook. "This is good, thanks."

"You're welcome. What did you want?" He bluntly asked her as she took his tea cup and drank some. He had been reduced to drinking the disgusting tea in the cafeteria. It was almost bad enough to make him drink coffee instead.

"I think I owe you a thank you." She told him as she finished her part of the sandwich.

"For what?" He was tired, bitter, and in no mood to talk to her. He had come to the chapel as a sort of penance. He had wanted to go to Mass today and light a candle for his father's birthday but Cuddy would skin him alive if he left the hospital. He tried to tell himself it didn't matter to him that he had missed his chance to pay his respects but the knew it was as much of a lie as when he told himself that lying to Diana's parents didn't bother him. He just wished that he knew how his father was still managing to domineer and intimidate him even from beyond the grave.

"For covering me up. That was very nice of you. That's the Chase I remember." She told him. He had been acting strange the last few weeks. Much moodier than usual then he would be even more flat than normal. She had actually been a little worried about him just before Christmas because he had seemed so down but then she had ceased caring because he had offered to work an entire shift for her so she could go home for five days straight.

"You looked cold." He told her by way of an explanation. He thought she looked rather sexy right now, with no make up and her hair down. He tended to prefer more organic woman to the heavily coiffed type.

She sighed and decided now would be a good time to tell Chase how much she appreciated his decision to go along with her. It meant a lot to her that he was willing to agree she was right. "Chase, I just wanted to tell you that," was as far as she got.

"Stop it." He snapped. "I don't agree with you. I still think what we are doing is wrong but it is just a whole lot less trouble to go along with it than to argue with you. You got your way. Just let it go." He stood up and left. He would go and scrub for surgery early just to get away from her.

Cameron watched him go, feeling equal parts sad and annoyed. She was sad because she could tell that Chase was upset and she hated it when something she did upset someone else. But she was annoyed because he seemed unable to express sadness or displeasure as anything other than sarcasm or sulking. She wanted to shake him and make him tell her he was pissed and why but she knew it would do any good. He would either say nothing or crack some unbelievably mean and hurtful joke to deflect the attention away from him. She watched him and House do that same dance at least once a week. She was beginning to think there was far more to his resistance than his desire to not work. House knew what was up with him but he wasn't talking either and damn it, she wanted to know. She would find out, eventually, she knew she would. She just had to wait long enough.

3:00 am January 2nd 2006

Chase stood outside of the Diana's door and took a deep breath. Linda Mckenzie, from the Organ Procurement board, peered down and her shoes with a bland look on her face. She was overweight and pale, with a visible mustache, short nose and puckery mouth covered in too bright red lipstick. She was tired and unfazed by Chase's reticence to face the family. He slid the door opened, giving them a tight lipped smile. All he could think about was the moment he had heard his father had both died and lied to him. It had been like getting simultaneously kicked in the face and the stomach.

"So what have the tests shown you?" The mother jumped up immediately. Chase wondered if she had slept at all, since they had arrived here.

"Bad news I'm afraid." Chase told them, and motioned for them to move towards the two chairs in the corner. He hooked the stool and rolled it over, let Linda fend for herself. She threw him a nasty look as she was left standing. He almost relented and gave into his years of polite social training but didn't. Right now he needed to be on eye level with them. "Diana's latest test confirm what we were afraid of, she is brain dead. I'm sorry." Chase fudged his response. There was no real definitive, quantifiable test for brain death, much like depression it was determined by weighing factors.

They were, of course, shocked and dismayed. Much as Chase had assumed, the mother recovered first. "But how, she's still breathing, her heart is still beating?"

Chase tried to ignore it, as Cameron slid in, wanting to be there in case the family needed her. But another weaker part of her, wanted to be present to see if Chase would trip up and admit what they had done. "That isn't entirely true. We are breathing for her. She has no brain function left. Everything that your little girl was, is already gone, her heart just hasn't realized it yet." He told them sympathetically. He had done this so many times before it was almost like reciting lines in a play. He took comfort in the predictability of it.

"But what about her heart beat? Doesn't that mean there is hope?" Her father asked. Cameron's heart nearly skipped a beat at the pain in his voice.

"I'm afraid not. The best way to describe it is that heart has its own rhythm that can remain unaffected by everything else. Basically it is like the battery in the motherboard of a computer that keeps time on the clock. The computer can be unplugged but the battery doesn't realize it. Diana's heart hasn't realized that her brain is dead yet." He looked from the mother to father, making sure they understood him.

"So there is nothing more you can do?" The father choked out.

"I'm sorry, no there isn't."

"What will happen now?" The mother wiped her tears away, trying to appear brave.

"That's really up to you."

"Hello," the organ ghoul butted her way in, "my name is Linda McKenzie, and I'm with the New Jersey Organ Procurement Board." She began to go through her explanations and sales pitch for giving their daughter's organs away. Chase left before she was even a third of the way through. Cameron met him outside.

"You handled that well." She complimented him.

" Lot's of experience." He told her as he began to walk away. He didn't feel like dealing with anyone right now. She didn't let him go though.

"You have to understand that we did the right thing." Cameron stopped him.

"Did waiting make her any less dead? Did waiting make it any easier for them to take her home and burry her? No, all it did was cost them a whole bunch of money they probably can't afford, make it even harder for them to face the fact that she is gone, and cause us to be at each other's throats when we should have been watching each other's backs."

"Chase, I" She started, unable to think what to say next. She didn't like fighting with Chase.

"You, what?" He asked her coldly but before she could answer, the door opened and the father called him back in.

"Dr. Chase, you have been so good to us, we just wanted to thank you." He extended his hand.

"Please, don't." Chase told him. This was just adding to his guilt.

"I was hoping you could answer a few more questions for us?"

"I can't give you any advice about whether to donate her organs. It's against hospital policy for me to try and sway you one way or another." He pointed out.

"No, we are just concerned about the mechanics of it. That woman isn't being particularly forthcoming about what will happen to her, if we" He trailed off.

"Of course." He raised his arm to motion for Mr. Mansfield to precede him in. Cameron followed, disregarding Chase's glare.

"What will happen if we don't agree to donate her organs?" The mother asked, her voice sounding hollow and numb.

"Either way we will bring you paperwork to sign that states you have been advised of her condition and you consenting to cease all extra ordinary life saving procedures. That is basically a long way of saying that you understand that she is brain dead and are willing to turn off the ventilators. We will then disconnect the tubes from the machine and she will stop breathing. Once her heart stops beating we will call the time of death and the body will be removed." The two grasped each other's hands. He hoped that they had a chance to work through this. He hoped they weren't one of the many families that were destroyed after such a tragedy.

"If you choose to donate her organs, then we will bring you a different set of papers to sign. We will call the time of death but she will stay as she is now until surgery can be scheduled. When it is, you will be given a chance to say goodbye to her before she is take in. The surgeons will then remove all of the organs and tissues that you agree to."

"Will it hurt her, to have her organ's removed?" The mother again. She continued to stroke her daughter's hair and Chase wished more than anything that Diana could feel it. He wanted to make Cameron answer because he wanted to hurt her. Her brilliant plan had given them a few hours to say good bye, but it had also given them the idea that she might get better. It only served to make it more difficult to convince them that she was gone. But he didn't. They needed solid answers not sympathy.

"No, she won't feel a thing. All of the parts of her brain that registered pain, no longer work. However, even if they did, we will anesthetize her just like we would if she were going in for any major surgery." Cameron hadn't known that. She never assisted in the harvesting surgeries; they were always left to Chase. She usually did the typing and cross matching. She also handled the recipient's aftercare immunosuppressant therapy. The actually mechanics of the transplants were things that she had had little knowledge or interest in after leaving med school. Much in the same way Chase tended to look like he was having absent seizures, while she was explaining to patients the different regimens of drugs they could take to prevent rejection.

"Will we be able to see her afterwards?"

"Yes, if you want, but I wouldn't recommend it. We will treat her with the utmost respect and nothing that we do would prevent you from having an open casket funeral, however, many people find it fairly traumatic to see there loved on after the surgery." He told them gently.

"Will you be the one doing the surgery?" The father asked a second question in a row.

"No, I'm not a surgeon. I can ask to be present as the intensivist assisting but I wouldn't actually perform the extractions."

"Oh. I'm sorry if these are dumb questions, but this is all so sudden. We thought she was getting better. Maybe if we wait a bit longer." The mother suggested.

"Waiting longer won't help anyone. It will actually damage her organs, if you choose to donate them. I know it is sudden and that it seems like it came out of no where but unfortunately it is true." He sighed, wanting to turn around and throttle Cameron behind him, knowing that it wouldn't be so sudden or so unexpected if she had just gotten grief counseling after her husband had died. "Listen, take some time to think about it. This is a big decision and I don't want you to feel pressured into making it. We'll come back in a while, ok?" He gave them a small smile.

"No, I think we would like to go ahead and donate her organs. Then at least a part of her can live on." Gasped her mother.

"Excellent." Linda said, with false cheer as she started getting their signatures. Chase again excused himself.

"Chase," She started again.

"Don't." He turned on her, anger flashing across his face.

"Please." She stammered, not sure what to say to him.

"Do you have dumb rabies or something? Can you not find someone else in this bloody place to bother? Just get the hell away from me!" He fairly yelled at her.

"Chase." She whispered to his retreating back. She then realized that half of the ward was staring at her. She ducked her head and walked out, trying to hide her blush. Maybe she would leave him alone for a little while.

6:15am January 2nd 2006

Chase woke to the most delightful scent of real black tea under his nose. He opened his eyes to look up into Foreman's dark brown ones. After a moment of disorientation, he remembered that he had asked Foreman to wake him up before his next surgery. He was stiff and creaky but not nearly as bad as he would have been if he had slept in House's chair.

He took the proffered cup and sipped at it, enjoying the burn on his tongue and the feeling as it warmed its way down into his stomach. He almost cried with joy when he realized it was good tea, strong, black, with two sugars, and just a touch of milk. He looked up, expecting to see Cameron behind Foreman. Instead, the black man sat down beside him on the cot, drinking his own coffee.

"What, isn't that the kind you like?" Foreman questioned.

"No, it's perfect. I was just wondering where it came from." He ran his hand through his hair, disliking the greasy, clumpy feel of it. Though, he felt vaguely flattered that Foreman knew how he liked his tea.

"I bribed April and she coughed it up." He joked, then corrected, "I actually just told her it was for you and she was more than willing to donate to the cause."

"I'll have to thank her." He drank more of it, twisting around so he was leaning against the wall and curling his legs up so Foreman had room to sit.

Foreman took a deep breath and forged forward. Normally he only enjoyed stirring the pot, not actually jumping into it but now he had no choice. He would lose his mind if Chase and Cameron kept fighting. He looked the other doctor in the eye. "You have to make up with Cameron." He held his hand up to forestall and protests. "I'm serious. She is twisting herself up over you being mad at her. She doesn't deserve that. Don't make her feel bad because you don't have the balls to stand up to people." He and Cameron had talked and it had been ugly. She was now as intent on figuring out why Chase was so dead set against telling the family as she was in getting him to agree. He felt very sorry for his fellow doctor. But she had been right, now that she had pointed it out, Chase had been acting strange for weeks. Then he remembered something he had read awhile back and he had a sinking feeling he knew why. He wanted to spare Chase the torture of Cameron's well meaning meddling for as long as he could, if for no other reason than it would only cause more fighting and make House happy.

"Why is everything my fault?" He asked sullenly. "How am I responsible for Cameron being unhappy? Why aren't you yelling at her because she made me unhappy?"

"Because if you are upset, you run and hide, not bothering anyone. If Cameron is upset she makes sure everyone around her knows it and is also miserable. Given a choice I would shoot your mother before I would say a harsh thing to her." He partially joked.

"That's reassuring."

"Fine. Basically I don't care if you are pissed off, depressed, or bloody suicidal because I don't really give a rat's ass how you feel. Cameron is a different story, she is my friend and I don't want you doing anything to make her feel worse than she already does. Do you understand me?" He said sternly, hoping that he could make Chase mad enough at him at he would forget about Cameron.

"Fair enough." Chase said quietly, feeling more than a little hurt. He knew Foreman didn't really like him but it still stung to hear him say it so blatantly. "I'm going to shower before my shift. Page me if you need me." He said evenly and left. He didn't want to be around any of his coworkers. He just wondered why everyone else in the entire hospital was allowed to have feeling and to get upset except for him. Well, except for him and Wilson. He wanted to go home and sleep.

7am January 2nd 2006

Cameron pulled her gloves on and shrugged into her jacket, wrapping her blue Casmir scarf about her neck. It had been a Christmas gift from Chase, very expensive and decadent just like sex with him. You may have to pay a huge price for it but the feel of it and bragging rights were well worth it. The scarf was one of the most beautiful things she had ever owned and frankly she had been rather surprised he had been able to pick out something that nice. She would be flattered that he had spent so much money on her but she knew that he really didn't get present for too many people so he could afford to go all out for the few he did. Plus, Chase seemed to have no concept of money. It sort of made her feel guilty that all she had gotten him was a lousy gift card for a local bookstore because she knew he liked to read. But at least she had picked on with a large selection of imported books and a huge puzzle section.

She walked over to the balcony door to lock it and came face to face with Chase himself, or rather, face to back. The Aussie was sitting outside, staring off into the space, small bits of snow blowing into his blonde hair. Without thinking, she forced her way onto the balcony and into his thoughts. The snow had finally all but died down and the world was painted new and bright as dawn began to break in the East. He wore his dark, navy fleece pullover on top of his scrubs. It made his eyes look more green than blue but also made him every bit as look pale and tired as he was. He clutched a large, paper cup of tea from the cafeteria in his hands. They were white from cold. She thought he looked dejected and lonely.

"Penny for your thoughts?" She said to him as she sat down beside him. The bench was cold and uncomfortable under her. She thought she would try one last time to get through to him, to make him understand that she was sorry for making him mad.

"They aren't worth a penny." He answered and sipped his tea.

"Why not?"

He sighed but didn't look at her. He did that a lot when he talked to her. He would sigh and then answer her after she nagged him for awhile, but at least he wasn't yelling or snapping. "I'm too knackered to come up with a coherent thought." She gave him a quizzical look that he caught out of the corner of his eye. "Tired." He corrected his wording so she would understand him.

"Then why are you still here? Foreman went home hours ago and I'm leaving now." She shivered once and noticed that Chase was trembling from the cold, which itself was odd since she well knew how much Chase disliked being cold. She had no idea why he didn't go back inside where it was warm. She took his drink and took a sip. It was very hot.

"The transplant teams are spread too thin. So all the intensivists are taking turns in surgery or in the one of the wards. We have upwards of 60 critical patients all over the hospital and only five intensivists. Cuddy threatened us with physical violence if any of us tried to leave." He gave her a weak grin. They were all exhausted. After the initial waves of wounded were over, she and Foreman were forced into hours and hours of after care and lab work. While Chase, went into the ICU to help or into surgery to assist the transplant teams, assisting transplants being one thing Chase was particularly good at. But fighting with Chase had perhaps been the most tiring thing of all.

"Have you gotten any sleep?" She wondered, concerned. Both she and Foreman had taken intermittent naps in the office over the last day and a half. She had not seen Chase sleeping in there since there initial argument.

"Yeah, I took a nap while I was in the ward earlier. I'm scheduled for surgery in half an hour. I thought I would come out in the cold to help wake me up." His hands were starting to tremble from shivers. He neglected to mention it was Diana's surgery. He had asked to do it as a sort of penance for lying to the family.

"Is it working?"

"Not really." He yawned for effect, or maybe because he needed to.

"Oh." She looked down at her feet, they were starting to tingle from the snow on them. She knew that, of all her colleagues even House, Chase was the touchiest to deal with sometimes. Foreman was kind to her and House cared about her and generally speaking, Chase was aloof but considerate. However, there were sometimes that he would go from sweet and sensitive to mean and spiteful in the blink of an eye. He could be so funny and comforting one minute yet become cold and distant from one sentence to the next. But what was the worst about it was that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to his mood swings. Cameron realized she was being too harsh, even Chase's mood swings were fairly reserved. It was all in his tone. She did know, though, one thing that would always set him off, was getting too personal with him. "Chase, about last night." She started

"You got your way. Can't we just forget about it? Do I have to role over and show you my underbelly so that you know you have won?" Chase pleaded, he was too tired to really work up any anger.

"Would you purr, if I rubbed your underbelly?" She asked him, smiling over at him.

"I would probably just fall asleep. What do want from me?" He sounded defeated and exhausted.

"I don't want you to be mad at me." She looked over at him. His nose and cheeks were red from the wind. He still wouldn't look at her.

"I'm not mad at you."

"Yes you are. You won't even look at me." Cameron pouted.

He finally turned to her. "Bugger me, Cam, please drop it. Just accept that not everyone is like you. Not everyone can look on the bright side all the time. Not everyone likes to live in ignorance of what is coming. And sometimes, it is better to warn people so they can prepare themselves and not be blind sided by bad news." He told her philosophically. His accent becoming stronger due to how tired he was or maybe he had been talking to a friend from back home.

"But why would you want to ruin what hope may exist by telling them bad news until you are absolutely sure?" She countered.

"Maybe so they and their family know and have a chance to say good bye, while there is still time to do so." There was something in the way he said this that made Cameron almost stop herself from finishing the argument. It had been there all weekend, only she had been too worked up to notice it before. There was a tone in his voice that said volumes more than his words only she didn't know him well enough to understand it. He wouldn't let her get close enough to know him.

"You have to see why it was important to wait though? This way they don't have to remember New Years Eve as the day their daughter died."

"So we let them sit and think everything was fine and that she had a chance of getting better because of a stupid holiday? It was crueler to give them false hope than the truth." He knew he could make her understand his point. He could tell her how it felt to be doubly shocked by death and dishonesty but he wouldn't. It was none of her business.

"But we did give them hope, even if it was only for a few hours. You must know what it feels like to hope?"

"I learned not to hope a long time ago." He answered bitterly. He was pulling even further away from her, back inside of his protective walls. She wanted to scream at him and tell him to stop being so defensive and so afraid but she knew that would drive him away faster than anything else. She had almost reveled in his rudeness earlier because it was a real human response, something they rarely saw from Chase.

Instead, she reached out and touched his check, forcing him to turn back around to face her as the bell in the middle of campus tolled the changing hour. She couldn't draw him closer with her words so she tried another track. When he was fully facing her, she leaned forward and brushed her lips against his in a soft kiss. "Happy New Year, Chase." She told him as she pulled away, noticing that he had closed his eyes. He gave her a small, brief smile, making one dimple appear. She loved it when he smiled, though it was hard to get him to do it for real. She wasn't sure if she could ever remember making him laugh.

"It's seven am and it's January 2nd. New years was 31 hours ago." He pointed out.

"It's New Years somewhere." She leaned in for another kiss, enjoying the feeling of another person near her and she loved the way her touch made him smile. It had been so long since she had felt close to someone like she did to Chase. True he was more of a friend that than a lover but now, at sunrise after the weekend they had just had, alone together she didn't care. She leaned in for another kiss. He dipped his head down, his bangs obscuring his eyes. Had she leaned in any closer, she would have gotten the bridge of his nose and a mouthful of hair.

"Friends only get one kiss." He quietly told her, though part of him wanted to pull her on top of him just to have more contact. He wanted to trail kisses down her stomach and be able to lick the taste of her off his lips. But he realized that it wasn't really Cameron he wanted. He just wanted someone, anyone, to take his mind off of his father and all of the lives he had let slip through his hands in the last two days. And he realized that it wasn't him that she wanted either. While normally this wouldn't be a problem for him, he had an annoying amount of respect and affection for her that prevented him from allowing things to go further. Though he had once taken consolation in her desperation, he wouldn't do it again. It wasn't fair to either of them. Additionally, he wasn't really that attracted to her. Sure, she was beautiful, smart, and kind but more often than not, extended contact with her had him trying to calculate whether he was strong enough to jump through the glass windows at the hospital to get away from her. He also neglected to correct her understanding of international time zones. The US was one of the last places to change years.

"I can handle friends." She told him and she moved her hand from his face, only to grasp one of his hands in her own. "As long as I have a shoulder to lean on." She told him as she rested her head against his shoulder to watch the sun rise. She didn't know why she was staying. She was exhausted and freezing but something told her that she needed to make Chase understand that she still cared about him. That just because they had had a disagreement, didn't mean that they weren't still friends. That she could forgive him for getting angry so it was only fair that he forgive her. She wouldn't have been able to articulate how she knew this or exactly what she knew, she just did.

"Of course, you do, as long as you need it." Chase answered and he too watched the sun rise on a New Day and a New Year with the same old problems.

TBC


End file.
